St Elmo (chapel)

It is one of the oldest chapels in this diocese and one of the few 15th-century buildings still surviving here, although over time it has undergone profound alterations. It was built through the devotion of seafarers and dedicated to their patron saint, Saint Peter

González Telmo, more commonly known by the name of St Elmo (Corpo Santo). Worship at this chapel is maintained by the fishing community of Funchal, and it was once the seat of a kind of relief society intended to support seafarers in sickness or disability. It is still not known at present whether the confraternity keeps this charitable character among its members. We shall transcribe what we found on the matter in the Diccionario Universal Portuguez Illustrado, which is truly interesting: ‘confraternities... there are two notable ones, both because they date from the time of the first settlement of the archipelago and because they form true mutual-aid associations: the confraternity of St Elmo, with its Manueline chapel at the eastern end of Funchal, and that of São Pedro Telmo, in the lugar (settlement ranking between a town and a parish) of Câmara de Lobos. Both belong to seafarers and clearly derive from the famous statutes (compromisso) of the Algarve seafarers, and, like these, they connect, in religious form, with the nautical institutions of the time of King Denis. The statutes of these two Madeiran confraternities, of which we possess a copy, are, like the Algarve one, precious documents for the history, obscure but glorious, not of princes nor of the navigators in their service, but of the pilots and sailors, the seafaring men properly so called, who had no small share in the discoveries’.