Seen from afar, the parish of Ponta do Sol looks as compact and picturesque as a postcard. There is a small roundabout in the center, a petrol station, a tiny shopping complex and a cluster of modest buildings topped with terracotta tiles. Undulating green slopes of bananas, palms and pines fan out behind, houses scattered over the hills. All this is surrounded by dramatic slopes and made subtropical lush by the many small waterfalls that gurgle from the rock face and fill ancient irrigation canals. When Gonçalo Hall first drove through the area in September 2020, the words that came to his mind were “What the fuck is this.”
Ponta do Sol is located on the south coast of Madeira, the main island of the Portuguese archipelago of the same name. Hall had been to Madeira once as a child, but he couldn’t remember it being so beautiful, so wild. Now, as he put it in an interview, he saw the place “with the eyes of a digital nomad.” He had returned to help run a remote working conference in Madeira’s regional capital, Funchal. The day after his long drive through the countryside, he approached the regional economy minister and asked bluntly: why do you sleep on digital nomads?
Hall, 35, is tall and husky, with blonde hair, blue eyes, a jovial demeanor and a tendency to speak hashtag mantras like “life is good” or “be happy, make millions.” He grew up in Lapa, Lisbon’s poshest neighborhood, but now has an apartment in Ponta do Sol with his wife, Catarina: Lisbon, he complained when we first met, had become too much of a melting pot. Hall had long dreamed of finding a lifestyle where he could come to work in flip flops and shorts instead of the suits and ties of the bankers in his family. In early 2019, the couple moved to Bali for two months, where Hall landed his first remote contracts, including a marketing gig for a company called Remote-how, accumulating quite a list of contacts in the process. Then they went again to Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and Bali, each spending a month or two before returning to Europe.
Back in Lisbon, after less than a year of the digital nomad lifestyle, Hall hosted conferences on remote work and digital nomadism, identifying himself as an expert on both. When he landed in Madeira, he took in the low cost of living, fast internet speeds, surfable beaches and Instagrammable beauty: the pillars of digital nomad marketing. He recognized something else about the pastoral pace. A small nomadic project he had visited just before his arrival in the archipelago in rural Spain had impressed him; it was charming, more intimate than the bustling urban hubs he’d experienced so far.
Established digital nomad hotspots, such as Chiang Mai, Thailand, or Canggu, Bali, are often bubbles where wealthy and predominantly white foreigners congregate in coffee shops, coworking spaces, and other businesses catering to their needs and comforts in English. If he built a destination for digital nomads in the small town of Madeira, Hall thought, things would be different. Itinerant remote workers can live just like the locals, alongside the locals: they can live in the same neighborhoods, eat in the same restaurants, and mingle at gatherings coordinated by a “community manager.” Hall decided to pitch his idea to the government of Madeira.
It was an easy sell. Tourism in the archipelago had plummeted due to Covid-19 travel bans that had barred travelers from outside the European Schengen area, so Hall suggested digital nomads as a remedy. Portugal’s urban centers were already saturated with homeworkers, but Madeira, less than two hours from Lisbon, was still under the radar. High-earning professionals could pour money into local businesses, Hall told regional officials. All they needed to welcome them was an inviting infrastructure and a ready network to land into. If he built it, Hall promised, they would come.
