Best hotels in Madeira | A Curated Visual Guide to Top Stays

An Overview of the Boutique & Luxury Hotel Landscape in Madeira

Reid's Palace has been watching ships arrive since 1891, perched on its promontory above Funchal with the kind of settled authority that comes from outlasting every trend in hospitality. The Belmond property remains the reference point against which everything else on this Atlantic island is measured — not because it resists change, but because its particular combination of clifftop gardens, whitewashed Edwardian architecture, and afternoon tea rituals has proved genuinely irreplaceable. The terraced grounds descend toward private saltwater pools and the sea below, and the effect is less resort than private estate that happens to accept guests. It sits west of Funchal's historic center, in a stretch of the waterfront that feels deliberately removed from the city's commercial energy. The Savoy Palace occupies a different register entirely. Opened in 2019 in the heart of Funchal, it is a contemporary tower development that references the Savoy Group's long history on the island while making no pretense of period architecture. Where Reid's cultivates seclusion and the weight of accumulated time, the Savoy Palace leans into scale and contemporary finish — its rooftop pools and interiors pitched toward a traveler who wants the city immediately accessible rather than kept at a cultivated distance. The two properties share a price gap of nearly four hundred dollars a night, which roughly maps onto the experiential distance between them: one is a retreat from Funchal, the other an immersion in it. Madeira itself complicates the usual logic of island travel. This is a place where levada walking trails cut through laurisilva forest that predates the arrival of European settlers, where the architecture of Funchal ranges from Manueline stonework to mid-century civic buildings to contemporary resort development along the waterfront, and where the light has a particular quality — Atlantic and equivocal — that makes the island feel neither Mediterranean nor quite northern European. For a design-conscious traveler, the choice between these two hotels is really a question of disposition. Reid's Palace offers the pleasure of a building that has been continuously refined rather than periodically reinvented, a place where the garden is as considered as the interior. The Savoy Palace offers proximity and a cleaner contemporary edge. Both reward the decision.