João Gonçalves Zarco (c. 1390 – 21 November 1471) was born in Portugal, and became a knight at the service of Prince Henry. In 1418 Prince Henry ordered a boat be prepared and delivered it to João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristao Vaz Teixeira and sent them to look for new lands. After a few days of travel Zarco arrive at an island he called Porto Santo. On his second voyage he discovered the island of Madeira. He made a full tour of the island naming the different areas he found such as Sao Laurenco (the name of his ship) the bay of Funchal and Camara de Lobos (chamber of Wolves animals which inhabited the area at the time). He died during the mid 15th century in Funchal. There are still decendents of Zarco on the island the Counts and Marquises of Ribeira Grande.
We wished to place a cache here in the Centre of Funchal which is a town and island that we fell in love with many years ago and visit regularly.
To log this Virtual Cache, you must complete two tasks:-
1 Take a photo of yourself at the Front of the Zarco statue (if you do not wish to identify yourself, have your back in the photo)
2 Count the number of stone slabs on the bottom level of the base which touch the pavement and send us the answer via a Message but not on your Log.
Virtual Rewards 2.0 - 2019/2020
This Virtual Cache is part of a limited release of Virtuals created between June 4, 2019 and June 4, 2020. Only 4,000 cache owners were given the opportunity to hide a Virtual Cache. Learn more about Virtual Rewards 2.0 on the Geocaching Blog.