Museum of Sugar

The production of sugar was one of the principal sources of income in the Madeira islands, 1100 km south-west of Lisbon, where there are many remains of refineries. The museum of sugar is housed in a building constructed on the foundations of the fifteenth-century home of Joao Esmeraldo, a Fleming and contemporary of Christopher Columbus. It depicts the history of Madeira’s sugar plantations, and of the processing and trading of the sugar they produced, with evidence from archaeological excavations and from pictures and maps.