1880 Facts about Port and Madeira by Henry Vizetelly

The Vineyards of Sao Martinlio, Cama de Lohos, &c. 165

From this breezy height we look down upon the one side on •a little fishing village with its rocky headlands, and the grand Cabo G-ii'ao and its miniature bay,and on the other into a fertile hollow, formerly covered with vines which yielded one of the finest and.most robust of Madeha growths. A year or two ago vines sloped dowm from the summit of the peak on all its sides and occupied every cultivated spot in the rear of the village; but the phylloxera has destroyed them nearly all, and the famous wine-growing district of Cama de Lobos, which used to produce 3,000 pipes annually,now yields merely 100. One of our party, Mr.Kussell Gordon, who had become a large landowner in this and adjacent districts through his marriage with a Portuguese lady of rank, informed us that even two years preceding Cama de Lobos jielded upwards of a couple ofthousand pipes of wine; but since then nearly the whole of the vines have been rooted up and sugar-canes planted in their place wherever a fair supply of the necessary water could be obtained. The peak itself, a mass of soft red friable stone, will grow, however, only vines, and therefore a large tract of ground has passed entirely out of cultivation. Everywhere around signs of the former prosperity of the distiict were visible—terraces rising upon terraces in every nook and coigne of vantage, with substantial stone-built easas surrounded by trees and gardens, dotting all the slopes. Higher up the mountain is the district known as the Bstreito de Cama de Lobos,some of the vines of which have been planted at an altitude httle short of a couple of thousand feet above the sea-level, or several hundred feet higher than the vine will thrive with certainty. As yet the phylloxera had only attacked the lower vines, but the others had suffered more or less from the unusual rains of the past spring and summer. Our bearers set forth again, and in the course of half an hour tiuned in at an open gateway along a narrow path beneath trelhses laden with large bunches of ripe grapes. We stopped at a little casa belonging to one of Mr. Gordon's tenants,which was literally embowered among vines, and turned out to be the dame school of the village. Here we breakfasted