Madeira 2025

Madeira

Date of Issue: 9th May 2025

one stamp (1.21 €) and one souvenir-sheet (3.51 €)

the stamp is issued in a mini-sheet of 10 stamps

The sugar industry or ‘White Gold’ (Funchal)
With the collaboration of the A Cidade do Açúcar Museum team, a group of artefacts was selected, including a ceramic sugar loaf form, which is part of the archaeological remains exhumed during the excavation of the house of the sugar merchant Janine Esmenaut, João Esmeraldo to the Portuguese, one of the oldest in the 16th century. This cultural asset, recovered by Modern Archaeology in Portugal, illustrates the important and lucrative island industry of sugar production, which began in 1425 with the planting of sugar cane, a central activity in the economy of the Atlantic islands, soon after the colonisation of the island, discovered in 1419. Within thirty years, Madeira, driven by mainly Genoese capital, initially using hired labour from Morocco and later African slave labour, as well as intensive forest clearing used to feed the sugar factories (around fifty kilos of wood were needed to produce one kilo of sugar), became the largest sugar producer in Europe, earning it the title of the ‘White Gold Islands’. From the first decades of the 16th century, production began to decline, with São Tomé and Príncipe and, above all, Brazil gradually emerging as new production sites, until it was definitively extinguished in 1986 with the closure of the William Hinton factory.