Laurel forest of this kind once covered southern Europe and North Africa; the glaciations erased nearly all of it. Madeira kept the largest surviving remnant. The Laurissilva spreads across roughly 15,000 hectares — close to a fifth of the island — and was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1999. Most of it has never been logged. Paved roads stop at its margins, which is one reason Fun Adventures Madeira Buggy Tours São Jorge Reviews tours begin where the tarmac gives out, on forestry gravel above Santana. Santana lies on the north coast, its neighbouring parish of São Jorge dropping toward a headland where a lighthouse has stood since 1959. The forest above both works as a water machine. Fog moving in off the Atlantic condenses on the leaves of til, Ocotea foetens, and vinhático, Persea indica, then drips to the ground and feeds the levadas — the island's hand-cut irrigation channels, more than 2,000 kilometres of them, begun in the fifteenth century. Madeira's agriculture was built on that condensation. So, later, was much of its hydroelectricity. The canopy is low, dense and evergreen, rarely rising far above twenty metres, and it shelters species found nowhere else. The trocaz pigeon, Columba trocaz, feeds on laurel fruit. The lily-of-the-valley tree, Clethra arborea, flowers white in late summer. Ferns hold the understorey where light fails. At Fanal, on the western plateau, til trees several centuries old stand in pasture cleared around their trunks. A Madeira off-road buggy tour through Laurissilva Forest crosses this mosaic at speed — eucalyptus plantation, then native laurel, then open ridge — which is the entire argument for the vehicle. General access to the forest costs 0 EUR; specific hiking trails carry separate fees. That open-gate arrangement helps explain the density of operators working the tracks between Caminho das Covas, the interior saddles and the south-coast ridges above Cabo Girão, whose sea cliff falls 580 metres to the water. Roll-caged Can-Am machines and self-drive passeios de buggy now share lanes once used only by foresters and levada keepers. Read Fun Adventures Madeira Buggy Tours São Jorge Reviews tickets against the terrain they actually cross, and the differences between routes become legible.