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Porto Santo

Island · Salt water · in Madeira

The low, dry, sedimentary island forty kilometres north-east of Madeira, with a single nine-kilometre calcareous sand beach along its south side and rock at both ends — the only substantial sand in the archipelago.

Safety: cliffs and rock platforms — can cause serious injury or death.

What each one does, and what reduces it ↓

FishingHQ describes what this place is, not whether you may fish it. Access, permits and who to ask.

What you can catch here

Documented at this place, grouped by how you would be fishing, with how strongly the sources support each one. This is what has been written down, not a forecast, and being listed is never permission to fish.

From the shore · 7

What these strengths mean
Established quarry
Fishing sources describe this as a normal local target here, not merely as caught.
Places, accounts and sources are counted separately
A fish documented once at each of six marks is still documented once at each of six marks. Breadth is reported as a place count and never raises the strength, and sources are deduplicated across places so one publisher covering a whole coast counts as one. A fishery account is a source describing the fishing; a recorded catch is a report of a specific catch. They are counted apart because they are not the same evidence.

Also associated with this ground

Recorded as present here without a documented method or strength behind them.

Common dentex · Greater amberjack · Atlantic horse mackerel

Fish documented nearby, not here

Nothing below has been documented at Porto Santo itself. Each one has been documented at a named place on the same ground, and the places are listed with it. Treat this as what the water around here holds rather than as a catch list for this mark.

Also documented at neighbouring places

One or two accounts each, on the ground around here. Enough to know the fish is caught in these waters; not enough to say anything about this place.

From the shore

How people fish it

Practised here: Sea fishing, Spearfishing.

Methods the sources name for this ground. Each one is explained in full on its own page.

  • Float fishing

    Suspending a bait at a controlled depth beneath a buoyant indicator — the most visual, most controllable and most widely applicable method in angling.

  • Spinning

    Casting an artificial lure and retrieving it so that it moves like something alive — the most direct form of lure fishing.

  • Ledgering

    Fishing a bait on the bottom held by a weight, with no float — the simplest way to fish at distance, in depth, or in wind.

The ground and the water

The ground
The low, dry, sedimentary island forty kilometres north-east of Madeira, with a single nine-kilometre calcareous sand beach along its south side and rock at both ends — the only substantial sand in the archipelago.
Exposure
Low and open with no mountain spine to shelter either coast, so it has no lee in the way Madeira's south coast does.
Depth
Shallower ground off the sand than anywhere on the main island, and rock and deep water off both ends.

Safety

Cliffs and rock platforms — Can cause serious injury or death

The north coast is cliff-bound and takes Atlantic swell with almost no shelf to dissipate it, so waves at exposed platforms are larger and less regular than the wind suggests. The sheltered south coast on the same day gives no warning of it.

What reduces it: Check swell rather than wind, and check it for the coast you are going to rather than for the island. Watch a platform for a sustained period before committing. Never fish a position you could not leave immediately.

Rules and access

FishingHQ does not know the current access position here. Madeira is an autonomous region of Portugal with its own fisheries administration, and recreational sea and underwater fishing are licensed regionally rather than by the mainland directorate. Species, size, quantity and gear measures apply and change, and marine protected areas around the archipelago constrain access independently. Check the current position with the regional fisheries directorate before going.

Particular to this water: The island is reached by ferry from Funchal or by air, and its waters carry the archipelago's protected-area framework. Access and any restriction are the regional authorities' answers.

Who holds the answer:

  • The Regional Directorate for Fisheries of Madeira, which licenses and regulates recreational sea and underwater fishing in the archipelago.
  • The port authority, for access to harbour structures.
  • The Regional Directorate for Fisheries of Madeira, for recreational licences, sizes and species rules
  • The managing authority of any marine protected area or nature reserve, whose zoning governs what is permitted inside it
  • The regional forestry and nature-conservation authority, for the levadas and the mountain streams
  • Harbour and port authorities, for access to quays, moles and slipways

Sources for this place

  • JNCC species and habitat conservation advice — Joint Nature Conservation Committee (Conservation authority)Relied on for: Description, designation and habitat characterisation of the named coastal and marine features of the United Kingdom, and the species characteristically associated with them.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
  • Cefas science, advice and data on marine and freshwater environments — Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Government fisheries body)Relied on for: Marine environmental science for UK shelf seas: sediment characterisation, estuarine process, shellfish bed distribution, tidal range and the monitoring that describes them.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
  • Fishing Madeira, and jigging and popping the Azores islands — GT Fishing (Practitioner report)Relied on for: That the named Madeiran locations are fished from the shore or from a boat for the species given, and the technique and season the operator attaches to each.FishingHQ's interpretation of what it saysPassage read and verified
  • Importance of recreational shore angling in the archipelago of Madeira (northeast Atlantic) — Scientia Marina (CSIC), vol. 84 no. 4, 2020 (Scientific literature)Relied on for: The catch composition of the Madeira archipelago's recreational shore fishery by species and by share of the estimated annual total, from a 2017 creel survey of 653 anglers.States this directlyPassage read and verified

How FishingHQ labels evidence is explained in the evidence policy. Last reviewed 2026-08-16.

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