If you live anywhere on the European continent, Hawaii can seem very far away and exotic.
Without any direct flights, going to Honolulu from cities like London or Paris will require either flying across an ocean and a continent for a transfer in Los Angeles or going in the other direction with a stopover in Tahiti — in either case, a journey that can take more than 20 hours of travel.
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As a result, many choose much closer destinations for a weekend away. In the last year, the nickname “Hawaii of Europe” for the Portuguese island of Madeira has increasingly taken off as a popular place to go as Portugal itself has been seeing an explosion in touristic demand post-pandemic.
Every couple of weeks, a travel writer will write about visiting “the Hawaii of Europe” to tap into “where could that be?” reader curiosity among North Americans (the average European will already know Madeira.)
Madeira is a popular tourist destination for Europeans.
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Why Madeira is so often called the ‘Hawaii of Europe’
While only a 90-minute flight from Lisbon, Madeira sits on the African Tectonic plate and so has multiple similarities with the tropical state in the South Pacific — crystal-blue waters interspersed with verdant hills, volcanic zones and a similar culture of farm workers and tourists coming in for the season (in the 1800s, thousands of Madeiran immigrants found their way to Hawaii for economic opportunity.)
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“As a large European tourist destination, Madeira welcomes approximately 1.2 million tourists a year,” writes a cross-cultural group. “There are opportunities for Hawaii to learn from Madeira, and vice versa, particularly in the area of eco-tourism and attracting European visitors.” It also touched base on the history of cross-migration and its similar environmental needs as “remote oceanic islands.”
If you’ve been following my writing, you may have read a piece voicing my dislike for calling smaller cities the “Paris of” something or “the Dubai of” something else. It’s simply a matter of geography and, if you live in the UK, you do not need any comparisons to view Madeira as a great place to go (over 330,000 Brits went last year, making up the largest group of international visitors by far) while I grew up on the West Coast of Canada and have been to actual Hawaii enough times to not consider it exotic.
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“Palermo is not ‘the new Lisbon’ while Curaçao is not a ‘St. Maarten dupe.’ All of these places are beautiful and worth a visit if only funds for frequent travel would allow,” I wrote at the time. “[…] With so much of the travel experience now available on social media for those who cannot go in person to experience, I think we really need to move away from calling smaller cities the ‘something of something else’ and start finding the wonders of different places (the world is large and there are so many out there.)”
Due to the shared history of migration, Madeira is probably closer to Hawaii than most other similar comparisons. But in either case, it looks absolutely stunning. Everyone should visit.
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