It’s a mouthful to pronounce no matter how it’s spelt, with a mixture of vowels and throaty Portuguese r‘s.
Madeira’s third highest mountain (1,818m) is a popular place to go and watch the sunrise. It’s also the start point of the famous Vereda do Areeiro (PR1) walk that connects to Pico das Torres (1,851m) and Pico Ruivo (1,861m). [NB: Only a 1.2km section of this walk is currently open after wildfires in 2024 burnt hectares of trees and destabilised a lot of the mountainside, making it unsafe.]
The word areeiro (meaning ‘sandpit’ or ‘location where there is a sand deposit or an area of sandy land’) comes from areia ‘sand’, and it is the official spelling of the mountain’s name. So, it is Pico do Areeiro. Arieiro, it seems, is just an often-seen typo.
