The 1933 Fountain at Largo do Ribeiro Real, Funchal Old Town

Easy to walk straight past and easy to fall in love with once you notice it: the fontanário — public street fountain — standing in Largo do Ribeiro Real, one of the small historic squares at the edge of Rua da Carreira in Funchal's Old Town. It's not a grand monument, just a working piece of early-20th-century city infrastructure, but it's a genuinely well-preserved one, and it sits right at the doorstep of one of Funchal's oldest streets.

The fountain dates to 1933 and was designed by Carlos Ramos, a Portuguese architect who went on to become one of the country's most influential 20th-century figures — decades later he headed the Porto architecture school and taught a generation that shaped modern Portuguese design. In the early 1930s, though, he was working for the Câmara Municipal do Funchal, designing a series of fontanários for the city, each stamped with the municipality's arms and the year of construction. The Largo do Ribeiro Real fountain was the first of that series — drawn up in June 1933 and built with four tiled faces instead of the three originally planned, on a larger scale than the others, clearly meant to anchor a square rather than sit quietly against a wall. The blue-and-white tile panels (azulejos) that wrap it are original to that design.

It's a small landmark, but a useful one if you're finding your way around on foot: Largo do Ribeiro Real sits directly opposite the entrance to Rua da Carreira, Funchal's 16th-century former horse-racing street (see our separate guide to Rua da Carreira & Zona Velha for its full history) — so the fountain works as a reliable meeting point or reference landmark when giving directions in this part of the Old Town.

Carreira Dreamscape, our self-catering apartment near Zona Velha in Funchal Old Town, looks straight out over this square — the fountain is visible from its balconies, along with the square itself, and it's typically the first thing guests notice stepping out the front door. If a walk through Funchal's Old Town and Rua da Carreira is part of your trip, staying somewhere you can see a piece of that history from your own balcony is hard to beat.