Museums and animals

Whaling history, life-size whales and stereoscopic 3D films in a purpose-built museum at Caniçal - the island's best museum for children by a distance.

• Indoors
• From 4
• Children free

Six screens inside the Fórum Madeira mall on Estrada Monumental, and the one place on the island where a children's film reliably runs dubbed into Portuguese.

• Indoors
• From 3
• No price published

Twelve tanks of Madeiran and Macaronesian sea life - groupers, moray eels, more than ninety native species - inside a rebuilt 18th-century fort by the Porto Moniz lava pools.

• Indoors
• Ages 2-10
• Children from 4 €

The house Columbus is said to have lived in, with ship models, period maps, navigation instruments and finds from the Slot ter Hooge wreck - Porto Santo's one real museum.

• Indoors
• From 6
• Children from 3 €

The municipality's exhibition hall on the Porto Moniz seafront, whose permanent show explains the UNESCO laurel forest the family has just driven through.

• Indoors
• Ages 5-14
• Children free

Over forty painted optical-illusion scenarios, including an upside-down room, built to be photographed with a child standing inside them.

• Indoors
• From 4
• Children from 8.1 €

The island's story - volcano, discovery, pirate raids, sugar, the flying boats that landed in the bay - told as a walk-through with models, archive film and a smell station.

• Indoors
• Ages 5-12
• No price published

A free, small archaeology museum on Praça Colombo, built over the excavated foundations of a 15th-century sugar merchant's house.

• Indoors
• Ages 7-12
• Children free

Cristiano Ronaldo's trophy room on the ground floor of the Pestana CR7 hotel: over 150 trophies including the Ballons d'Or, match-worn kit, a wax figure and an augmented-reality photo spot.

• Indoors
• Ages 6-14
• Children from 3 €

About twenty thousand toys - British, Portuguese, French and German, from the late 19th century on - behind glass on the second floor of the Armazém do Mercado.

• Indoors
• Ages 5-11
• Children from 3 €

The 1897 power station that lit Funchal, kept as a museum with its turbines and generators still standing in the hall.

• Indoors
• Ages 6-12
• Children from 3 €

The island's ethnography museum in Ribeira Brava, built round a working water mill and a sugar-cane press, with fishing, weaving, wine and wicker laid out as processes.

• Indoors
• Ages 6-12
• Children from 3 €

The city's own natural history collection in the Palácio de São Pedro on Rua da Mouraria: Madeiran birds, fish, fossils, monk seal material and a small basement aquarium.

• Indoors
• Ages 3-10
• Children free

One room of fossils, minerals, insects and preserved Madeiran vertebrates inside the Botanical Garden, covered by the garden ticket.

• Indoors
• Ages 5-12
• Children free

Three rooms of uniforms, swords and weaponry from the 18th century on, inside the São Lourenço fortress on the Funchal seafront.

• Indoors
• Ages 5-12
• No price published

A free lime-kiln museum in the hills above São Vicente: a thirty-minute walk from the limestone quarries to the kiln, fossils over five million years old, and a film on how lime was burned.

• Outdoors
• Ages 6-14
• Children free

A manor-house museum uphill from the cathedral whose romantic garden - stonework, old trees, a small chapel - is free to walk and open to anyone.

• Partly covered
• From 2
• Children free

A working teaching farm at Prazeres with ponies, donkeys, goats, rabbits and birds, an orchard and herb garden, and a tea house that serves its own produce.

• Outdoors
• Ages 1-8
• No price published

The regional botanical garden on the Bom Sucesso hillside, with a cactus terrace, the patterned carpet beds, an aviary of parrots and macaws, and its own cable car down from Monte.

• Outdoors
• Ages 3-12
• Children free

A steeply terraced hillside garden at the top of the Monte cable car, with koi ponds, an oriental garden, azulejo panels and a small terracotta army.

• Outdoors
• Ages 6-12
• Children free

Fourteen hectares of Blandy family estate at 500 metres above Funchal, camellia avenues and a sunken garden and 650-odd labelled species, free for anyone under 15.

• Outdoors
• From 5
• Children free

A concrete art museum cut into a cliff above Calheta, with an 18 € family ticket and an education service whose workshops are never published in advance.

• Indoors
• From 6
• Children from 5 €

The intact nineteenth-century Vicente photographic studio, kept as a museum, and the only place in Funchal running darkroom workshops for children.

• Indoors
• From 8
• Children from 3 €

Naturalist-led birdwatching run by two biologists since 2004, of which exactly two products work with a child: the half-day land tour and the birds-and-cetaceans boat out of Machico.

• Outdoors
• From 8
• No price published

Funchal's municipal theatre slots three or four properly staged children's titles into each six-month season, baby theatre included, at five to ten euros a seat.

• Indoors
• From 3
• Children from 5 €

The yellow 17th-century fort above Barreirinha - ramparts, cannon and an archaeology museum - closed, with access to the on-site restaurant only.

• Indoors
• From 4
• No price published

Eight lava tubes from an eruption about 890,000 years ago, more than a kilometre of them and up to six metres high, with a volcanism pavilion next door - closed indefinitely.

• Indoors
• From 4
• No price published