About Levadas
What the Levadas score is, and what it is not
Madeira does not plan like other islands. A coast, a ridge and a high plateau sit within an hour of each other, and each keeps its own weather. It can be warm and clear where you are staying while the trail you picked is in cloud, in wind and far colder, at the same hour of the same day. A forecast for the town does not know that, and a guide written last season cannot: what decides your morning is not what the trail is like, it is what it is like today.
The version that works is not more research. It is leaving in the morning already knowing which open trail is the good one today, which hour it turns, and where you would go instead if it does not hold. That is what the number on this site is for: one reading, in place of the hour you would otherwise spend holding a forecast, a closure list and somebody's post from March against each other.
Whether that number deserves the trust is the rest of this page.
What the score is, and what it is not
The 0 to 100 score is an algorithmic suggestion for planning a day. It is not a safety clearance. It does not know that you are tired, that your boots are wrong, that you are walking with a six year old, or that the section you are on came apart in last night's rain. Treat it the way you treat a forecast: one input, and not the one that decides whether you turn back.
One thing overrides it completely. If IFCN (Instituto das Florestas e Conservação da Natureza), Madeira's forest and trail authority, has closed a trail, the score is 0 and the page says closed, however good the weather looks and however much the rest of the data disagrees. Official status beats the algorithm every time, and there is no setting anywhere that changes that.
See what every trail is scoring right now, and the hours that actually workThe rules this project holds itself to
Two of them decide what you see, and they are the reason a page here will sometimes tell you nothing at all.
- An official closure forces the score to 0. It is the only hard override in the system.
- If a number cannot be shown honestly, you get a dash and the words data unavailable. A half computed score is worse than no score, because you would act on it.
What is free, and what costs money
Everything on these public pages is free and needs no account: distances, official status and closures, what each trail costs to book, the weather guides, the GPX tracks.
What costs money is the dated layer, the part that is different at 7am and at noon: the live score, the rankings, whole path weather instead of trailhead weather, and the exact window for a Magic Moment. The split is deliberate. The facts belong to whoever wants them. The call is the part that took the work, and it is the part a pass buys.
Bugs, corrections and feature requests
Something wrong, something broken, or something you wish this did? Write in. Every message is read and every one is considered, and corrections get made. Send it to info@levadas.live.
For bloggers & site owners
Running a Madeira travel blog or hiking resource? Our live data widgets (trail status, alerts, fees and climate normals) are free to embed, carry fresh data, and include a levadas.live backlink by default.
Common questions
Is Levadas an official source?
No. IFCN is the authority for Madeira's walking routes: it classifies them and it closes them. Levadas reads what IFCN publishes and shows it alongside everything else, but if their site and this one disagree, theirs is the version that counts.
Can I rely on the score for safety?
No, and no score of this kind should be relied on that way. It is a planning aid built from public data, which is why every page that shows one says so. Check the official status yourself, look at the sky, and turn back when the path stops matching what you were told. In Portugal, including Madeira, the emergency number is 112.
Where the rest of it lives
This page says nothing about today's conditions, what a levada is, or what a trail costs. Each of those has its own page: which trails are open today · what a levada actually is · Which trails are free
Full source list, licences and attributions: Legal and payments.