Funchal · the Atlantic · 1815 – 1950
Before antibiotics, Europe's crowned heads sailed to one mild Atlantic island to breathe. They came to be cured. Some were. Some are still here.
Read the register ↓For most of a century, the cure for a failing chest was not a medicine but a place. Doctors in Vienna, London and Rio sent their wealthiest, most important patients south to Madeira — a subtropical island a thousand miles into the Atlantic, frost-free, still, and forgiving. The titled and the royal came by the shipload to winter in its quintas and, they hoped, to mend.
The island obliged often enough to keep its reputation, and failed often enough to fill its English cemetery. What follows is a record of the people who came wearing crowns — the ones who left restored, and the ones who never left at all.
The register
Three who are remembered
The last Habsburg emperor
Persenbeug 1887 — Monte 1922
Exiled here. · Dead at thirty-four.
Deposed, penniless, and barred from Europe, the last Emperor of Austria-Hungary was sent to Madeira with his pregnant wife. A cold became pneumonia. He is entombed on the hill at Monte — and was beatified in 2004.
Read the account →
Empress of Austria
Munich 1837 — Geneva 1898
Sent to heal. · Healed, then lost.
Her doctors feared consumption and prescribed the island. She wintered here in 1860–61 with the support of Queen Victoria's yacht, her lungs recovered — and she relapsed within days of reaching Vienna. A statue of her stands in a Funchal garden.
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Princess of Brazil
Paris 1831 — Funchal 1853
Came for the cure. · Twenty-one.
The daughter of an emperor, engaged to an archduke, brought to Funchal as a last hope against tuberculosis. She died here at twenty-one. Her grieving mother built a hospital in her name; her fiancé's grief sent him toward a doomed throne in Mexico.
Read the account →The guest book
The royal story is also a hotel story. The cliff-top Reid's Palace, opened in 1891, became a stage for the whole twentieth century: Churchill painted the bay at Câmara de Lobos in 1950; George Bernard Shaw, sixty-eight, learned to tango there and called his instructor “the only man who ever taught me anything.”
And just down the cliff, the exiled Emperor Charles first lodged at the Villa Vittoria, next door — so that for a few months in 1921, a dying emperor and a luxury hotel shared a hedge. There is even the matter of Napoleon's untouched cask of Madeira, refused off Funchal in 1815.
A walk you can take today