Hotel Girassol

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The hotel Girassol is comfortable, with good food and largely friendly staff.
Accommodation is in an 11 storey block, quite ugly outside. This wasn't shown on the picture in Thomas Cook's brochure.
The hotel is pleasant inside, but some areas need updating. There is a nice heated pool set in an attractive garden.
My main complaint is that Madeira is rapidly being spoilt by insensitive development.
The ugly little airport is now linked to the capital, Funchal, by a horrible motorway, which makes no concessions to the scenery.
Funchal itself has an attractive and well cared for historic centre, but the hotel zone (huge) on the west side is dominated by an uncoordinated jumble of awful tower blocks, which wouldn't be out of place in England!
In this area some lovely old houses had been left to decay. Even remote villages on the sparsely populated north coast have been spoilt by hard-edged modern building.
The residents of Madeira should be thoroughly ashamed at how they are ruining large areas of their island in the name of financial profit.
By contrast, the high mountainous and forested centre of the island is splendid, with soaring cloud-shrouded peaks and a wealth of unique plant life - a UNESCO ecological reserve.
A walk along one of the famous levadas - drainage channels - up in the mountains was unforgettable.
There are also several wonderful botanical gardens, especially around Funchal, which itself abounds in trees and flowers.
However, as beautiful as much of the island still is, the relentless tide of development will deter us from visiting it again. Sad indeed.