Belmond Reid's Palace

Winston Churchill came to paint. George Bernard Shaw came to learn the tango. The hotel has clung to its clifftop above the Atlantic on the island of Madeira since 1891, when a Scottish entrepreneur named William Reid built the palace he had spent his life dreaming of. He died the year before it opened. The gardens, cascading down the cliff to the sea, are subtropical and extravagant, and the terrace is one of those settings that photographs cannot quite capture. 158 rooms and a sense of transatlantic gentility that has survived every fashion since the Victorian era.