Porto Santo (health resort)

The neighbouring island of Porto Santo (‘holy harbour’) has long been recommended as an excellent health resort for the cure of certain diseases. The number of Madeiran visitors who go there is not greater because of the lack of hotels and suitable accommodation, and also because of the complete absence of comfort, speed and safety in the vessels used to carry passengers. There is no one in Madeira who is unaware of this. Dr Nuno Silvestre Teixeira – who was a professor at our Medical School, served as health officer (delegado de saúde) of the district and was a distinguished practitioner of the medical sciences through his studies and polished writings, and who had moreover spent long periods on that island – states that a stay on Porto Santo has far more beneficial and wholesome effects than the same length of time spent taking mineral and medicinal waters at the spas where they rise.

The words of Dr Nuno Teixeira deserve to be recorded here, for in our view they constitute a complete study of the subject.

The island of Porto Santo, says this physician, is unique as a health resort, because it combines qualities and sanitary conditions that, as far as we know, are found together nowhere else, and certainly not to such an excellent degree as on that island. They allow the simultaneous use of thalassotherapy, or sea bathing, on a beach that has no rival abroad in any country; of grapes, than which none better are known; and of mineral waters that need fear no comparison with the best in Portugal and abroad. Which health resort in the world, we ask, offers the healthful and wholesome resources that characterise Porto Santo, where the invalid finds sea bathing, grapes and mineral waters all at the same time? We know of none but Porto Santo, and Porto Santo alone. Abroad, the beaches are far from the spas, and sea bathing cannot be combined with mineral waters. Treatment with grapes, it seems to us, is not practised anywhere in our country, and abroad this treatment, or ampelotherapy, stands on its own and is not used together with sea bathing and mineral waters. Porto Santo alone, therefore, offers the three great agents for restoring the body – sea, grapes and mineral waters – which can be applied at the same time, if necessary, and in conditions of unsurpassable purity and curative power.

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As for sea bathing, Porto Santo has the finest beach known, much appreciated and even admired by foreigners. It is three léguas of pure, yellowish, golden sand, with no intervening boulders forming rock pools in which to bathe, as on some beaches in Portugal.

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The sea water is exceptionally pure, with no refuse to foul it, because no sewers or industrial outflows empty into the bay. The bottom is a reef (restinga), very shallow for a great distance from the breakwater, so that a bather who cannot swim can go far out from the beach while still touching the bottom, which makes it very suitable for ladies. It is a beach where no bathing attendant is needed, because there are no currents that could carry non-swimmers out to the open sea, as has sometimes happened on the beaches of the mainland.

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All these excellences and refinements of the beach of Porto Santo culminate in the uniformity of the floor of the bay, always flat, always even, with no hollows or holes into which an inexperienced bather might suddenly sink, dragged further down by the vortex of the undertow. That is a danger on every beach, but it does not exist on that of Porto Santo.

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It is therefore an ideal beach, combining every possible perfection, and we know of none abroad that can compare with it. In former times it was used by some English families living in this city, who went to Porto Santo expressly, with their bathing tents, to bathe on the splendid beach. The beach is also the club or assembly where, in the evening, the families spending the summer on that island gather to talk, sing, play music and play games.

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Having dealt with the beach, let us now consider the grapes. We knew a gentleman who lived in Paris with his family and with whom we were on very friendly terms. He was eighty-three years old when we were introduced to him, and he was in very good spirits for his age, despite the ailments common to all old people. He lived in Paris, as I said, and with the first heat of summer he lost all desire to eat; he had no appetite for anything except grapes. In Paris, however, grapes do not appear on the market until September, and the person of whom we speak could not wait so long, because he lost his appetite at the very beginning of July. So he came to Porto Santo to feed himself, as he put it. He was the first to begin eating grapes and the last to stop, and since the grape harvest in those days went on until the end of September, he ate grapes from mid-July to the end of September, that is, for two and a half months. He ate nothing but grapes, for no other food appealed to him. From the first year we knew him, he came to Porto Santo every year to eat grapes for as long as he lived. He told everyone that, as soon as he began his grape diet, he enjoyed far better health and saw all his usual complaints disappear, and he assured them that the grapes had prolonged his life and greatly improved his health. He died at the age of ninety-four.

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Let us now consider the mineral waters of Porto Santo. The improvement felt by people suffering from dyspepsia who take the waters of Porto Santo is a commonplace fact, so ordinary is it, especially if the waters are taken on the island itself, at their source. We wish to relate a case known to us which is extraordinary, quite remarkable, and which proves the almost miraculous action of Porto Santo water. There was a young man here, our contemporary at the lyceum (state secondary school) of this city, very talented and one of the most distinguished poets of his time, especially in the humorous genre; his satirical verses were extremely amusing and much appreciated in this city. Sadly, he died young of pulmonary tuberculosis, from which he had suffered for several years. He was a senior employee of the now defunct Banco Comercial da Madeira and, being ill, he accompanied the director and founder of that bank, the prominent landowner and well-liked citizen João de Sales Caldeira, to Porto Santo every year. The young man of whom we speak, like all consumptives, was a dyspeptic, but his stomach was so sensitive and intolerant that everything disagreed with him. He took only liquids; his stomach would accept no food that needed chewing, for it was immediately vomited and brought on diarrhoea. His broths had to be strained; a single grain of rice or a tiny strand of vermicelli was enough to cause indigestion. Yet this poor young man, whom here in Madeira it was a real torment for his lady to feed, as we heard her say more than once, and whose stomach tolerated nothing but strained broths, ate everything on Porto Santo: cabbage soup, melons, watermelons, grapes, etc., and nothing disagreed with him. What we state is a fact, for we witnessed it many times. It is possible that this extraordinary tolerance of the stomach was the result of various factors – rest, climate, atmospheric surroundings – but the waters were surely the most important.',

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In conclusion: sea bathing, grapes and mineral waters – such is the threefold claim that recommends Porto Santo as a health resort, one which is certainly not surpassed, nor even equalled, by any other.