Why an island became a cure

Before there were antibiotics there was the climate. In the nineteenth century, the standard answer a doctor could give to a patient with consumption — pulmonary tuberculosis — or with some lingering respiratory or “nervous” complaint, was not a medicine but a place: a long convalescence somewhere warm, dry and well aired, far from the cold and the soot of a northern winter. Those who could afford it packed their trunks and went in search of better air. And one of the most fashionable destinations they chose was a small Portuguese island in the Atlantic.

Madeira lies roughly a thousand kilometres off the African and Portuguese coast — subtropical, mild, frost-free, washed by clean sea air. Its climate was remarkably stable: no hard winters, no extremes, the kind of even warmth that Victorian medicine prized above almost any tonic. It took its place among the great “cures” of the age, named in the same breath as Nice, the high clear air of Davos, and the dry warmth of Egypt.

The trade in invalids

And so they came — wealthy “invalids” from Britain, Germany, Austria and beyond, sailing south as the northern autumn closed in. Some stayed a single winter; others settled for a year or two, hoping that time and air would do what nothing at home had managed. They did not check into hotels, for there were none to speak of at first. They rented the island's grand farm-villas — the quintas — and lived among the vines and the shade trees on the slopes above Funchal.

Out of that traffic grew a livelihood. A Scottish entrepreneur named William Reid made his fortune hiring out quintas to these visitors, long before his sons turned the family name into an institution. That story — the villas, the steamers, and the famous cliff-top hotel that opened in 1891 — belongs to its own chapter; you can follow it on the page about the grand hotels of Funchal.

A climate cannot be bottled, so the island became the medicine — and an entire economy grew around the hope of breathing easier. The register

The Atlantic sanatorium

In time the island earned a name that captured both its promise and its melancholy: a kind of “Atlantic sanatorium”. It was a place people travelled to in order to get well — and, by the same logic, a place where the gravely ill gathered. The air that healed the early consumptive could do nothing for the advanced case but make its final months gentler.

The royal and imperial accounts collected in this record are all, at heart, this same story told at the highest rank. Empress Elisabeth of Austria — Sisi — is the textbook example of the feared consumptive who improved on the island and then relapsed once she returned to colder Vienna in 1861: proof, to her contemporaries, of what the climate could and could not hold. For others the cure came too late. Princess Maria Amélia of Brazil died here of tuberculosis in 1853, and Emperor Charles I, the last of the Habsburgs, died here in 1922. They were sent to the same air, and the island kept them.

The traces they left

The visitors changed the island as much as the island marked them. A British merchant community took root in Funchal, numbering as many as some five hundred people at its nineteenth-century peak — merchants, doctors, families, and a long succession of winter convalescents. They built the things a community of exiles needs: an Anglican church and a British Cemetery, both of which still survive in Funchal today. They are the quiet physical record of the foreigners who came for the air — and, in many cases, never sailed home.

To walk the city and its hills now is to read that history in stone. If you would rather trace it on the ground, the royal trail gathers the places where these accounts were lived and ended.