Hey there my Hive friends and followers!
It has already been some 7 months since we visited the spectacular Portuguese island called Madeira but so far, for a variety of reasons, I have only managed to publish a handful of posts about this extraordinary place. I can see that my last Madeira post is more than 2 months old now so it´s high time to roll out another one.
For many years, our dear American friend 
Known as Mercado dos Lavradores (which means Farmers´ Market in English), this iconic place can be found near the historic center of Funchal, the capital city of Madeira. Opened since as early as 1940, Mercado dos Lavradores is a huge market that offers an incredible range of local fruits, vegetables, flowers and sea food. But don´t get me wrong. This place is not your regular street market. It literally feels like a giant museum of wonderful fresh colors, shapes, smells and flavors. Words really cannot do much justice to the ambiance of this unique place so let me show you around through some pictures that I took there. We will start out in the fruit, veggie & flower sections and then, we will move to the fish market aka Praca do Peixe in the local language ;)
As you can see in the pictures, the market is always full of people. The locals usually go there to buy fresh food but there is also a lot of tourists who appear to just roam around like Alice in Wonderland, trying to absorb all those lovely colors, smells and flavors. The vendors willingly let you taste their products first but trust me, once you taste, there is now way you could leave without buying. Everything in there is just so irresistibly fresh and delicious!
As for the fish market, I think I know what fish caught your attention. Oh yeah, I was also like "What the fuck is this?!" when I saw those scary black monsters with giant teeth and burst eyes for the first time :D It´s the Black Scabbardfish, a curious species of the Cutlassfish that is found deep in the North Atlantic Ocean. These creatures live as deep as in 1,700 m (5,600 ft) below the sea level and that´s actually also the reason why their eyes burst when the fishermen catch them and bring them up to the surface. The sudden air pressure reduction simply cause their eyes to explode. The Black Scabbardfish is a very typical and traditional fish on Madeira but they are sometimes also caught on the Canary Islands, France, Ireland and even Iceland. The flash of this fish is of exceptional quality, making the Scabbardfish a very popular seafood, although it sometimes contains dangerous amounts of some toxic metals.
So yeah, that was a little tour around the famous Mercado dos Lavradores. I hope that you enjoyed this post and maybe even learned something new :) Also, I hope that my next Madeira post will show up here on my blog sooner than in two months like it happened with this one :D :/
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