The best cycling routes around Paul do Mar

The church is situated on a square that lies below sea level. It used to be regularly flooded and renovated by the locals. Currently, it is protected by a breakwater with a promenade.

great educational garden

The educational garden can also be viewed from the outside, many chickens or corns, an emu and various other birds, there is a café in the park

Upstairs, with a bit of art (during the flower festival), and downstairs, a sandy beach. (There are also restaurants in between.)

Nice road with fewer cars than in other estradas regionais

Great descent leading to Prazeres

Dont miss the view!

Patrícia Sumares presents us with a sculptural mural of large proportions, composed of over three thousand face sculp tures. These were created from two hundred and fifty molds of not only local residents of Ponta do Sol, but also tourists and others who showed an interest in taking part in this project. To this end, the artist has been creating the face molds at her atelier over this past year (in between the two editions of the Aqui Acola festival), capturing the essence of each physiognomy and calling upon the public at large to take an active part in her work. The onlooker takes on the role of co-creator, insofar that they participate in the mak-ing of the work, "lending" their face and becoming a living part of the panel itself. But they are more than mere faces; they are the expressions and feelings of a community, its life stories and collective memories. They are human landscapes of hope which reveal a certain sense of spirituality and civic union. The face and its underlying symbolic issues have been a re-curring theme in Patrícia Sumares work, through sculptural installations that propose a philosophical examination of life, the perennial, hope, and memory. The subtlety and po-etry of her visual discourse have come to characterize how she approaches the art of sculpture, creating pieces that function as metaphors for the human condition. Contrary to the more conventional artworks that make up a large part of Madeira's public art, the artist proposes an artistic intervention with a sense of community, as it calls upon the citizens to "show their faces" for the project. This cooperative relationship and creative partnership is intrin sic to the spirit of a public art that foments a societal com mitment to the valorization and promotion of an effective participation of society in the artistic endeavor. The artist's work also reflects an effort to demystify Art itself, making it acessible to the common citizen, since it allows for their direct involvement in and sharing of the creative act. In this sense, art can be seen as a catalyzer for the collective energy and development of the human potential. However, it is not merely through the different faces that the artist establishes a specific relationship with the locale where the artistic intervention is to take place. Contrasting with the background, a "flock" of bird silhouettes, charac-teristic of Madeira's fauna, appears. These mirrored shapes, imbued with an intense visual dynamic, emerge from the mural creating a diversity of fruitive possibilities, through their forceful interaction with the surrounding space. This is achieved through the interplay of their reflective surfac-es with the encompassing landscape, and through exploring different chromatic effects produced by the way the light is focused. The mirrored surfaces not only duplicate the land-scape, creating new spatial relations, but also warp the visual perception, introducing another dimension to the work. In this intercalated organization of shapes, one can observe how the expressive values of light and shadow are wrought so as to truly stimulate the onlookers imagination-leading to the discovery of its diverse symbolic associations. It also calls for an introspective contemplation from its onlookers, giving rise to a sort of collective identification.