Infant Asylum

The establishment of an asylum, which seems to have been the second of its kind founded in our country, is owed to the first governor of Madeira in the constitutional period, the illustrious Luís da Silva Mousinho de Albuquerque. Although his term of office was very short, lasting only from August 1834 to September 1835, he neglected no essential point of public administration. He also took the initiative of creating an asylum for the destitute orphans of Funchal, and in his wife, Dona Ana Mascarenhas de Ataíde, he found the most active and effective collaborator in the charitable work he had undertaken. The idea, which was new and met a great public need, won the widest acceptance and was greeted by the whole population of Funchal with the most enthusiastic excitement, which unfortunately did not last long.

Four months after Luís Mousinho’s arrival on this island, that is, around the middle of December 1834, the new charitable establishment began to operate. It was provisionally housed in some of the outbuildings of the Palácio de São Lourenço (‘St Lawrence’), under the direct supervision and the solicitous and loving direction of its founders themselves. It came to shelter 120 children and remained in a state of relative prosperity for as long as its founders stayed on this island. It was still thanks to that initial impetus that, by a ministerial order (portaria) of 13 January 1836, a house in the Campo da Barca (‘boat field’) belonging to the National Treasury (Fazenda Nacional) was obtained for the asylum to move into. It operated there for some years and ceased to exist at a date we cannot establish with complete accuracy. After the departure of Luís Mousinho de Albuquerque and his devoted and charitable wife, the work they had created with such dedication and affection began slowly to decline, until it died out completely, leaving behind only the blessed memory of its illustrious founders.

José Silvestre Ribeiro regarded himself, in founding the Funchal Beggars’ Asylum (Asilo da Mendicidade do Funchal), as merely the continuer of Mousinho’s work. Even today, in the entrance hall of that asylum’s building, there are two canvases, already badly damaged by time, depicting Luís da Silva Mousinho de Albuquerque and his wife, Dona Ana de Mascarenhas e Ataíde; they ought to be scrupulously preserved there and also suitably restored.

Planned asylum at the Angústias (‘sorrows’). In 1837 the Funchal Municipal Council (Câmara Municipal do Funchal) once again resolved to found an asylum to take in the old and infirm who begged in the streets of the city. It informed the central government of this resolution, which the government praised in a ministerial order (portaria) of 7 June 1838. To carry out this lofty and humane idea, the councillors lost no time in arranging the construction of a suitable building. The site chosen was the land where the Asilo da Mendicidade e Orfãos now stands, which the first Count of Carvalhal (‘oak grove’) had given for that purpose shortly before his death. Construction work, carried out to the plan and design drawn up by the director of public works, the engineer Vicente de Paula Teixeira, began on 8 August 1837, and the municipality spent approximately thirteen contos de réis (conto: one million réis) on the building. The building was almost completed, but it was never put to the use for which it had originally been intended. It never opened its doors to inmates, because the councillors who had taken that initiative, or those who succeeded them on the Council, abandoned the idea of creating the asylum, for reasons entirely unknown to us.