Travel Tips

Cabo Girão: the 5 euro ticket, the bus that is now 267, and the cable car that is not at the viewpoint

Madeira Guide

October 8, 2026

10 min read

The drop under the glass floor is 580 metres, the ticket has been 5 euros since 1 January 2026, and on a weekday exactly two buses from Funchal pass the viewpoint at all. What nobody tells you is that the last bus back past it leaves Ribeira Brava at 12:35, that route 7 became ten numbers on 9 March 2026 and only 267 goes via the cape, that an advance ticket is valid for 180 days, and that the cable car everyone looks for starts in another village entirely. Also why the highest-in-Europe claim on the sign is wrong.

Cabo Girão is the stop every coach tour west of Funchal makes, and for most visitors it is twenty minutes: through a turnstile, out onto a glass floor, photographs, back on the bus. That is a perfectly good way to spend twenty minutes. Three things have changed recently enough that most of what you will read about the visit is wrong: the ticket went up on 1 January 2026, the bus stopped being route 7 in March, and the cable car people expect to find at the viewpoint starts somewhere else entirely.

What you are actually choosing between

There are three versions of this outing, and they are not interchangeable.

The first is the viewpoint on its own. You pay, you walk out onto the suspended glass platform, you look 580 metres straight down at the terraced fields on the shore. With a car it is a short detour off the road west. By bus it takes most of a morning, for reasons that become clear further down.

The second is the viewpoint plus the fajãs, the strip of cultivated land at the foot of the cliff. There is a cable car down to it, but it does not leave from the viewpoint. It leaves from Sítio do Rancho, which is a separate drive and not a walk.

The third is the viewpoint plus the walk down to Câmara de Lobos. The old paths off the headland drop to the fishing town below, and nothing about them is booked or charged, because none of them is a classified trail. They are also unmarked and steep, and a poor idea on a day when the cloud is down.

The ticket is 5 euros, and it went up this year

The regional government has charged for access since 2023, and the price has moved twice since.

The current figure comes from Portaria n.º 591/2025 of 27 October 2025, which rewrote the fee table and took effect on 1 January 2026. The table has three rows and no others:

Child up to and including 12 years: free
Resident in the Autonomous Region of Madeira: free
Over 12 years: 5.00 euros

The same document sets out how it got there. Portaria n.º 946/2022 of 22 December 2022 introduced the charge at 2.00 euros. Portaria n.º 567/2024 of 24 October 2024 raised it to 3.00 euros. The 2025 order took it to 5.00. The enabling rule allows the tariff to be updated once a year provided the new figure is published 60 days before it applies, so a visit planned for next January should be budgeted at more than 5 euros rather than exactly 5.

The tourism board gives the opening hours as 08:00 to 20:00, daily. Since the fee is collected at turnstiles rather than by a person, arriving outside that window means finding the gates shut rather than finding the place free.

The residents' exemption is not something a visitor can talk their way into. It works off a resident's card issued through the regional SIMplifica portal, read by the turnstile as a QR code, and the card itself is tied to the residence certificate used for the mobility subsidy.

Buying it without queuing

There are three ticket kiosks at the viewpoint, and they take cash, Multibanco, credit cards and MB Way. You can also buy in advance through simplifica.madeira.gov.pt, in the Bilhética section, which emails you a PDF and a pkpass file for a phone wallet. This is the same portal that handles the booking fees for the island's classified walking trails, so anyone who has already reserved a hiking slot has an account.

Tickets are valid for 180 days from issue. If you are on the island for a fortnight and not sure which morning will be clear, buying ahead costs you nothing in flexibility.

A group ticket is one ticket carrying a number of entries, and the turnstile stays unlocked after the first scan until that number is used. The count stops when the ticket is scanned a second time, or when nobody uses the turnstile for a short period. So send your group through together, and do not re-scan the code to check that it worked.

About the sign that says highest in Europe

The regional tourism board's own page calls Cabo Girão the highest promontory in Europe, and its Portuguese page goes further, calling it the highest sea cliff in Europe and the second highest in the world. The 580 metre figure is solid and is what the drop under the glass actually measures. The superlative is not.

Croaghaun, on Achill Island in Ireland, reaches 688 metres, and is itself ranked third in Europe behind Hornelen in Norway and Cape Enniberg in the Faroes. At least three European sea cliffs are higher than this one. None of that makes the view worse. It is worth knowing only because the claim is printed on souvenirs, repeated by every tour desk, and sometimes used to justify the entry fee.

The bus is 267 now, not 7

Madeira's transport authority renumbered the entire bus network with effect from 9 March 2026, and the Cabo Girão service came out of it badly.

Before the change, one number covered the Funchal to Ribeira Brava corridor: route 7. In the renumbering table, that single number becomes ten. Two are expressway runs that do not go near the headland, four take other inland detours or the plain regional road, and three are local services around Ribeira Brava itself. Exactly one row carries the cape in its name: 267, Funchal to Ribeira Brava via Cabo Girão and Aviceiro. That is the bus you want, and every guide that still says "take the 7" is now pointing you at one of nine others.

The timetable does not help. The sheet published for this route today is still headed "Carreira n.º 7": it is current, and it is the right document, but the number on its cover is the one the renumbering abolished. What it does carry is a footnote system, and footnote c) means via Cabo Girão. Only trips marked c) pass the viewpoint:

Monday to Friday, from Funchal: 11:00 and 15:30
Saturdays, from Funchal: 10:05, 11:00 and 12:15
Sundays and holidays, from Funchal: 10:05, 12:05 and 13:30

Coming back, the trips marked c) leave Ribeira Brava at 10:10, 11:00 and 12:35 on weekdays, 11:45, 12:35 and 13:30 on Saturdays, and 11:45, 13:30 and 15:30 on Sundays and holidays.

Neither sheet prints a time for the viewpoint itself. For that the operator publishes a separate locality sheet for the Cabo Girão stop, and it is six years old, dated 1 October 2020. It is still usable, because every departure it lists under route 7 matches a trip the current sheet marks via Cabo Girão, at the same minute, on all three day types. Only the number has moved. On that sheet the journey up from Funchal takes about 45 minutes: the 11:00 passes the viewpoint at 11:45 and the 15:30 at 16:20, and coming down, the 10:10, 11:00 and 12:35 out of Ribeira Brava pass at 10:40, 11:30 and 13:00.

The weekday trap

On a weekday there are two departures from Funchal that pass the viewpoint, at 11:00 and 15:30, and three returns that pass it, the last of them leaving Ribeira Brava at 12:35. Take the 11:00 out and you are at the railing by about 11:45, with the 12:35 from Ribeira Brava coming past around 13:00. That is an hour and a quarter at the cape, which is enough for the platform and a coffee, but it is the whole visit.

Take the 15:30 instead and there is no bus back past the viewpoint that day at all. You would be walking down to Câmara de Lobos, in the late afternoon, on an unmarked path, or paying for a taxi off the headland.

Saturdays and Sundays are kinder, with three trips each way, and the last one back past the viewpoint runs later: it passes at about 13:55 on a Saturday and 15:55 on a Sunday. If your only free day is a weekday and you do not have a car, plan on the 11:00 and nothing else, or treat Cabo Girão as a stop on a longer run out to Ribeira Brava rather than a destination of its own.

What the bus costs

Fares across the whole island network are set by Portaria n.º 428/2025 of 22 August, as amended by Portaria n.º 128/2026 of 23 March, which applied a 2.28 per cent update for 2026. Funchal to Cabo Girão crosses from Funchal into the municipality of Câmara de Lobos, so it is an intermunicipal journey, not a municipal one:

On-board single, intermunicipal: 2.65 euros
Child on board, intermunicipal: 1.30 euros
Pre-bought per trip, intermunicipal: 2.00 euros
One-day pass, intermunicipal: 6.55 euros

A return bought from the driver is 5.30 euros, so the day pass only pays for itself if you are making a third journey. One rule in the tariff is useful here: a validated intermunicipal ticket allows transfers for 90 minutes on any operator, against 45 minutes and the same operator for a municipal one. Tickets bought on board are the exception and are good only for the bus you bought them on.

The cable car is a different trip

The Teleférico das Fajãs do Cabo Girão, usually called the Rancho cable car, runs down the cliff to the fajãs and the beach at Fajã do Rancho, and it has a bar and restaurant at the bottom. It was built so that farmers from the parish of Quinta Grande could reach fields that were otherwise a scramble.

It is not part of the viewpoint visit, though. Its address is Estrada Santa Clara, Sítio do Rancho, in Câmara de Lobos, a separate approach by road.

Treat it as a bonus rather than a fixture of the day. The tourism board lists it as open every day of the week and describes two cabins carrying six people each, and that is the extent of the published information. There is no official tariff, no phone number on the official listing, and the only contact given is an email address. Arrive with cash, arrive early rather than late, and have a plan that survives finding it shut.

Why the cliff looks the way it does

Cabo Girão is a protected area in its own right, on land and at sea, and the protection is what governs what can be built or done on the slope below the glass.

Decreto Legislativo Regional n.º 8/2017/M of 9 March 2017 created the Área Protegida do Cabo Girão, combining a natural monument and a protected landscape on land with a marine park offshore. The marine park came first, under Decreto Legislativo Regional n.º 4/2017/M of 30 January 2017, and is classified in IUCN category VI, the category for sustainable use alongside protection. Its limits are drawn by depth and height rather than by fences: the 50 metre depth contour to the south, the 10 metre contour above the shoreline to the north, the Ribeira da Alforra to the east and the Ribeira da Quinta Grande to the west.

Where to base yourself

Nobody needs to stay at Cabo Girão. The headland has no village of its own, and it sits on the road west out of Funchal, so almost everyone sees it from somewhere else.

Câmara de Lobos below it is a working fishing town with good cheap places to eat, and it makes a reasonable base for the south coast. Churchill painted the harbour from the Espírito Santo viewpoint on 5 January 1950, the one public appearance of an otherwise private stay, and the spot now carries his name. It is also the municipality that contains the cape, and like Funchal it charges two euros a night in municipal tourist tax, with a seven-night cap and a list of exemptions covered in our tourist tax guide.

If you want the view rather than the town, the band of hills above Funchal looks along this coast towards the cape, sits above the worst of the summer heat, and keeps the road west within easy reach. Madeira with Views lets apartments in exactly that band, and our where to stay guide sets the areas against each other in full.

Two nearby trips pair well with the cape, and both are in the same municipality. Curral das Freiras and Eira do Serrado is the mountain version of the same half day, and had its bus renumbered by the same order. Doca do Cavacas, at the western end of Funchal's bathing complexes, is the cheapest swim with Cabo Girão in the view.

Quick answers

How much is the Cabo Girão skywalk? 5.00 euros for anyone over 12 since 1 January 2026, under Portaria n.º 591/2025. Children of 12 and under are free, and so are residents of Madeira with a SIMplifica resident's card. Buy at one of the three kiosks or online in advance; an advance ticket is valid for 180 days.

Which bus goes to Cabo Girão? Route 267, Funchal to Ribeira Brava via Cabo Girão and Aviceiro, which was part of route 7 until 9 March 2026. Only the departures marked "via Cabo Girão" pass the viewpoint: 11:00 and 15:30 from Funchal on weekdays, three trips a day at weekends. The fare is the intermunicipal one, 2.65 euros on board.

Can I take the cable car down from the skywalk? No. The Rancho cable car to the fajãs starts at Sítio do Rancho in Câmara de Lobos, reached separately by road, and the tourism board publishes neither its fares nor its hours beyond saying it runs daily.

Is it really the highest cliff in Europe? No, although the sign and the souvenirs say so. The 580 metre drop is accurate. Croaghaun in Ireland is 688 metres, and is ranked only third in Europe, behind cliffs in Norway and the Faroes.

Sources

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