Meet Tomé
Our guest this time is Catherine's dear friend Tomé, a Madeiran who founded Jaca Hostel in Porto da Cruz together with his partner. Catherine heard about him as "the founder of Jaca Hostel" years before she actually met him, and it took her a while to connect the dots. The hostel has since become a second home to her, and their sons play together. Mark had never met Tomé, but they had plenty in common: both fathers, both entrepreneurs. Mark was just a little jealous that Tomé has lived on Madeira for so long.
Tomé is 42, which puts him in an interesting spot. As a child he still caught what he calls "a little aroma" of the old Madeira, before computers, mobile phones, motorways and the longer airport runway. Not the Madeira of his great-grandfather, who had no cars, roads or electricity. But enough to feel how different it was.
Lunch is ready when you hear the firework
As kids in Porto da Cruz, Tomé and his cousins and friends arranged everything the day before: a time and a place to meet. If someone was late, you waited and kept yourself busy.
His favourite story shows how differently people communicated. When the family went for lunch at a little local restaurant in the village, his parents would say: "When you hear the firework, lunch is ready. Come and meet us." One bang, and you'd hear it everywhere in the village, even out in the sea while surfing.
Those firework bangs still go off today, at village festivals, when a procession starts or when Mass begins. Catherine had always wondered who sets off these random bangs without any actual fireworks. Now she knows: in a village spread across the mountains, it's simply the best way to let everyone know something is happening.
Three changes that reshaped the island
For Tomé, three big changes stand out.
The internet. He got his first computer and internet connection at around 14. Madeira is very isolated, and that shapes people's mentality. Suddenly having access to information and to the world was huge. He and his friends used mIRC, an early chat program, mainly to arrange football and surfing with friends they already had. As he remembers it, Madeira was actually early in one way: the transatlantic cable came through Madeira and was tested here before reaching the mainland. But dial-up internet in people's homes reached the mainland years earlier. Fast internet in Porto da Cruz is only about 15 years old. When they opened the hostel eight years ago, getting a stable connection was still a struggle.
Mobile phones. Big Motorola and Alcatel bricks with antennas you had to pull out. For the first time, you didn't need to be at home to talk to someone.
After COVID. More people discovering Madeira, younger people settling here and starting businesses. Tomé sees it as a breath of fresh air, because isolation, economically, politically and in people's mindset, was one of the island's biggest weaknesses. He enjoys many of the businesses newcomers have started here, and he goes to them.
A hard place to live
Behind today's holiday paradise is a much tougher story. Because of the landscape and the rough sea, food was hard to come by. With no electricity, people had to go up into the mountains to cut wood for fire, and they couldn't keep food fresh. Many families only ate meat once a year, at Christmas. Tomé's mother is 73, and until she was 12, her village had no electricity.
Healthcare was scarce too. Tomé's grandfather was the first cardiologist on Madeira, and for several years the only one. His stories of how people lived, struggled and died, and how many children were orphaned, are hard to believe today.
People had to fight to survive almost daily. That makes you very resilient.
Tomé thinks that's also why people became so religious: they needed something to hold on to.
When the roads made the island smaller
Tomé was born in Funchal, but both his parents' families come from Porto da Cruz, and his great-grandfather from nearby Faial. He's related to half the village. Growing up, he came every weekend and spent the whole three- to four-month summer holiday here.
The drive went over the old road through Camacha and Santo da Serra. It took almost an hour of bends, slow lorries and buses you couldn't overtake, and he got so carsick that his mum regularly had to stop so he could get some air. Today the same trip takes 20 to 25 minutes.
The roads made the island much smaller. Tomé was 20 before he went to Ponta do Pargo for the first time. It was three or four hours each way, so why would you go unless you had somewhere to sleep?
Why Tomé started a hostel
Growing up in a village, always seeing the same faces, could feel suffocating. Tomé thinks anyone who has lived here for more than two years will know that feeling. Imagine it 35 years ago. As a kid he dreamt of meeting new people and foreigners. The idea of a hostel came at 19 or 20, on his first Interrail trip around Europe with friends. His family's house in Porto da Cruz stood empty, and he thought: that would make a great hostel. It would bring him exactly what he needed to enjoy living there: new people, new minds and new stories.
He says luck played a part too. He's quite sure there would be no hostel in Porto da Cruz without the motorway and the internet, and without the hostel he would never have met Catherine or so many of his friends. Mark put it nicely: most people who long for the world leave and keep travelling. Tomé brought the travellers to him.
What locals think about newcomers
Mark asked about something some foreigners say: that Madeirans can be hard to connect with. Tomé thinks most Madeirans are grateful for tourism and foreigners. Almost every family has at least one member who depends on tourism, and life is so much easier than in their grandparents' stories. He doesn't hear many complaints in his own circles.
Madeirans can be hard to become close friends with, but he thinks that's true everywhere. If you were born here, you already have your family, your friends and your safe place, so you don't need more. And people about ten to fifteen years older than him are often not comfortable speaking English, which creates some distance.
The one thing he thinks all Madeirans would agree is a problem: house prices and rents. Wages in Portugal are among the lowest in Europe, so local people feel it more. In his view, it's a bit of both. Prices are rising worldwide, but more and more people are also discovering Madeira since COVID: a mild, subtropical climate, plenty of water, lush nature and good food. A place like this is getting harder to find.
Why he came back
Tomé spent a long time away. He lived in Lisbon for ten years, in Cáceres in Spain for a year, and for a year between Munich and Chicago, and he has travelled to most continents. When he first got to Lisbon, it felt like freedom, and he didn't want to come back.
But he had to leave the island to really see its value. He realised he can't live far from the sea. Just looking at it quietly is almost his meditation time. What eventually got to him in Lisbon was the traffic: more than an hour a day stuck in a car, and the stress and anxiety that come with it. When he caught himself yelling and honking at people, he wondered what was happening to him. The environment shapes you, he says. Either you leave, or you go with the flow.
On Madeira he has time to help people, to listen and to be kind. Friends of his in Paris and London tell him they never see each other because everything is too far away. "I made the right decision," he thinks.
He notices a different sense of time even between Porto da Cruz and Funchal. Still, Porto da Cruz and Funchal are much more alike than Funchal and Lisbon. In the village there's more time to think, to be creative and to get lost in your thoughts, with less noise and fewer ads polluting your mind.
What visitors don't see
Catherine asked what people from outside misunderstand about Madeira. Tomé's answer: they see a paradise where everything looks easy, and they don't know it wasn't always like that. The hard past is still in the blood of today's Madeirans, passed on through their parents' stories and upbringing. He doesn't judge visitors for it. It's only natural. But the island isn't all butterflies and flowers.
Raising his son on Madeira
Tomé's son is two years and eight months old. Madeira can offer him a much better quality of life than his ancestors had, though buying or building a house of his own will be harder. Where his schooling will go, Tomé honestly doesn't know. With AI and robotics changing so fast, he can't picture the world in 15 years, or whether university will still matter.
What he does know is which values he and his partner want to pass on: love, kindness, being open-minded, not judging people, social skills and family roots. And when his son grows up, they'll give him wings to go wherever he wants.
I'm not raising a child to look after me when I'm old. I just want him to treat his kids the way I treated him.
Catherine added that their son is lucky to grow up with parents who turn ideas into something real, right in front of him.
Got questions for Tomé, our source of Madeiran knowledge? Send them to us by email or leave a comment under the video. Or go and say hello at Jaca Hostel in Porto da Cruz.
