The Mountain That Healed: Caramulo's Century-Old Legacy of Health

Long before wellness became a trend, people came to Serra do Caramulo to breathe. The mountain air at 1,000 metres - clean, cold, and alive - was the prescription. The story of Caramulo as a place of healing begins in 1921 and continues, in its own way, today.

A Doctor's Vision (1921)

In 1921, Dr. Jerónimo de Lacerda, a young physician from Coimbra who graduated with near-perfect marks, arrived at the slopes of Serra do Caramulo with a bold idea: build a health resort from nothing, in the middle of the Portuguese mountains. Tuberculosis was ravaging Europe. The cure, as understood at the time, was altitude, sun, and pure air. Caramulo, at 800–1,000 metres, had all three in abundance.

The following year, the Sociedade do Caramulo was founded and the Hotel do Caramulo opened its doors, the first building of what would become the most ambitious health project on the Iberian Peninsula.

The White City on the Mountain

What followed was extraordinary. Within two decades, Caramulo grew to host 19 sanatoriums and 18 private curing houses, more than 1,100 beds in total. At its peak, over 2,500 tuberculosis patients were living here, breathing the mountain air as treatment. It was the second-largest health resort in all of Europe.

The architecture reflected the medical thinking of the era. Wide balconies, south-facing terraces, and large windows maximised sunlight exposure essential for treating respiratory disease. Elegant Art Déco facades gave the buildings a clean, modern gravity. The Chapel of Nossa Senhora da Esperança and the leafy neighbourhood of Fonte dos Amores, where doctors and staff lived, still stand as reminders of what was built here.

A Town Built Around Health

Caramulo was the only municipality in Portugal designed and built from scratch as a health resort. By 1938, it had piped water in every home, its own hydroelectric dam, a modern sewage network, waste incineration, a cinema, a radio station, hotels, cafés and restaurants. This was infrastructure decades ahead of rural Portugal, all in service of one idea: that the mountain could heal.

Among the visitors drawn here were figures of national importance. António Oliveira Salazar, a friend of Jerónimo de Lacerda, came regularly. The journalist and cultural director António Ferro visited too. For a mountain village, Caramulo had a remarkable cultural gravity.

The End of an Era, and a New Beginning

By the 1970s, tuberculosis had been largely eradicated in Western Europe. The sanatoriums emptied slowly. The last one closed in 1986. The buildings that remained, some still standing today, became monuments to a lost purpose.

But Jerónimo de Lacerda's sons, Abel and João, had seen this coming. In the 1950s, they founded what would become the Museu do Caramulo, an extraordinary museum on a mountain, housing 500 works of art from ancient Egypt to Picasso alongside 100 classic automobiles and motorcycles. Their goal was to give Caramulo a new identity: not the place of disease, but a place of culture, beauty, and altitude. It worked. The museum has welcomed over one and a half million visitors.

The Air Has Not Changed

A century on, the thing that drew people to Caramulo in the first place, the air, the altitude, the silence, the forest - remains exactly as it was. Science has simply caught up with what Dr. Lacerda understood intuitively: that nature heals. That pure air matters. That stepping away from noise and speed and routine is not a luxury, it is medicine.

At Avenida CoLab, we think about this history often. The building that houses our space stands on the same avenue as the old sanatoriums, Av. Dr. Jerónimo de Lacerda. The name is not a coincidence. When we invite people to come up the mountain to work, to think, to breathe and to walk in the forest, we are continuing a very old conversation about what this place can do for people.

The prescription has not changed. Only the name has.