Which Madeira trails are free, and which need a booking

No. Of the 42 classified PR trails, 33 require a paid SIMplifica reservation and 9 are free to walk. Every other marked route on Madeira and Porto Santo is free and needs no booking. The fee regime is Portaria 801/2025 of 10 December, as amended by Portaria 48/2026 of 13 February.

Most are. Of the 111 trails we track, 78 are free to walk with no booking, including many levadas and all the community and municipal paths. The exceptions are the regulated official PR trails, which since 2025 require a small paid reservation through the government's SIMplifica portal.

Both, and the split is worth knowing. 9 of the 78 free routes carry an official classified code from IFCN, the same classification the ticketed ones have. The rest are council and community walks: some published and maintained by the municipality they sit in, others long-established paths with no classification at all. Each one has a page here with its distance and where it starts.

Vereda do Galhano e Levada da Ribeira da Janela, at 23.2 km, and it needs no fee and no booking, like 78 of the 111 routes on this page. One caution on that number: the distance shown for each route is the figure its own panel or council publishes, so a one-way route and a there-and-back route are not counted the same way.

No. The 78 free routes sit in 11 different councils, Porto Santo included, so the free half is not a corner of the map you have to drive to. The table above gives the council for every one of them.

2 of the 5 Porto Santo routes we track need a paid reservation on the government portal, and the other 3 are free to walk. It is the same regional regime as Madeira: only a classified route can carry a fee, and not every classified route does.

Most classified routes cost EUR 4.50 per person, and PR1 (Pico do Areeiro to Pico Ruivo) sits at the top of the scale at EUR 10.50 for the full route, which already covers PR1.1, PR1.2 and PR1.3 at no extra fee. Children aged 12 or under pay nothing and still need their own booked slot. Fees change; the official IFCN fee FAQ is the binding source, and each trail page here shows the figure we track.

No. There is no entrance ticket for Madeira's protected areas, and nothing charges you for walking in the laurel forest as such. The fee attaches to a specific classified route and to nothing else, which is why 33 of the walks on this page carry one and 78 of the 111 do not. The instrument that sets it is Portaria 801/2025, republished in full by Portaria 48/2026.

Parking and the trail fee are two separate things in the law. The trail fee is a taxa; the car parks IFCN runs itself carry a price, set in the second annex of the same portaria. That annex lists the Pico do Areeiro viewpoint car park at EUR 4.00 an hour, with the first 30 minutes free and a ceiling of EUR 20 a day. What we cannot tell you is whether it is being collected: the tariff has been in force since January 2026, and IFCN's own visitor page for the site does not mention a car park.

No. Portaria 48/2026 of 13 February amended the 2025 fee regime and then republished the whole of it, which is why it reads like a new law, and the amounts did not move. That republication is also why one document now carries the entire regime, so a source quoting Portaria 801/2025 and a source quoting Portaria 48/2026 are quoting the same figures.

The regional government sets them, by portaria. IFCN, the body that classifies and manages the trails, administers them, which is why a refund is claimed from IFCN and not from the booking portal. The payment itself is taken on the government's own SIMplifica portal at the moment you reserve. Nothing on this page is sold by us, and none of the fee reaches us.

No, and the two are sold by different people. The park authority sells access; Levadas sells information: the live verdict, the Moments and the map. Of the 111 trails we track, 78 need no fee and no booking at all. On the 33 that do, you reserve and pay on the government's SIMplifica portal, never here.

Bookings are made on the SIMplifica portal, per person and per day, with a rolling window of about six days ahead. Popular morning slots for PR1 sell out first. Our step-by-step SIMplifica guide covers the whole flow, and the app shows live slot availability so you do not refresh the portal by hand.

Residents and young children have reduced or free access under the current rules. Under the official IFCN fee FAQ, residents with a SIMplifica resident card, children aged 12 and under, and people with a disability of 60 percent or more all travel free, worth checking at booking time because the scheme has been adjusted more than once since its 2025 introduction.

Official IFCN closures override everything: a closed trail is closed regardless of your booking, and conditions on the mountain change fast. Check the live trail status on the morning itself; our scores hard-override to zero on any official closure, so you will not walk into a shut gate unaware.

No separate permit exists. What Madeira actually requires is a paid SIMplifica booking for 33 regulated trails; the other 78 of the 111 routes we track, including every unclassified community trail, need neither a permit nor a booking.