Santana
The Santana houses, a twenty-minute stop people plan a day around
The short answer
The Casas Típicas de Santana are small triangular thatched houses in blue, red and white, built of timber with steeply pitched straw roofs to shed rain. Inside there is a ground floor with a kitchen and a bedroom, and a loft for storing crops. The roadside houses are a preserved display.
Santana, January rainfall normal
106.9 mm
Against 67.1 mm at the Funchal station in the same month. Derived from the IPMA regional bulletin.
IPMA, 1991–2020 normal · check it · read August 26, 2026The facts
| Where | Santana |
|---|---|
| Type | Culture, markets and the wine |
| How long | Twenty minutes |
| Difficulty | Easy |
| Cost | No admission charge published |
| Best season | Year round |
| Permit | No permit recorded |
What they are
The houses are timber-framed with straw roofs pitched steeply enough to shed the rain that falls on this side of the island. Internally they are a single ground floor with a kitchen and a bedroom, and a loft above it for storing crops.
The steep roof is not decoration. Santana sits on the wet north coast, where the rainfall normal is materially higher than Funchal’s, and the building form is a response to that.
What the visit is
The houses beside the road in Santana are preserved and interpreted rather than occupied. There is a Núcleo de Casas Típicas de Santana for the explained version.
No admission charge is published for viewing them. That is recorded here as an absence of a published price rather than a positive claim that entry is free.
What is not perfect about it
The houses at the roadside centre are a preserved display rather than lived-in dwellings, and the whole stop is over in about twenty minutes. Driving to Santana for this alone is a long way for a short look; it works as an add-on to Queimadas or PR9, not as a destination.
Questions people actually ask
Do people still live in the Santana houses?
The houses at the roadside centre are a preserved display. They are not lived-in dwellings.
How long does the Santana houses stop take?
About twenty minutes. It works as part of a day that also includes Queimadas or PR9, rather than as the reason for the drive.
Is there an entry fee?
No admission charge is published by the tourism board for viewing the houses.
Where this came from
- Visit Madeira: Casas de Santana. visitmadeira.com/en/where-to-go/madeira/north-coast/santan Read August 26, 2026.
- IPMA: Boletim Climatológico da Região Autónoma da Madeira — January 2026. ipma.pt/resources.www/docs/im.publicacoes/edicoes Read August 26, 2026.