Caldas da Rainha

Caldas da Rainha in the Oeste region of Portugal was founded in 1484 by Queen Leonor of Portugal as the world's first purpose-built thermal hospital, after the queen stopped her royal procession to bathe in a spontaneous sulphurous spring beside the road and experienced such immediate relief from her skin ailment that she ordered the construction of a hospital and thermal baths on the site, establishing a tradition of royal patronage and public thermal medicine that has continued without interruption for over five centuries. The sulphurous spring water, rising warm from geological formations in the limestone massif of the Estremadura, has been prescribed continuously since the Queen's founding of the hospital for skin conditions, gynaecological ailments, and respiratory complaints in what must be the oldest institutionally established public thermal medicine programme in the world. The city that grew around the hospital, famous also for its distinctive phallic ceramic tradition introduced as a social satire in the eighteenth century and now celebrated as a beloved cultural quirk, provides an irresistibly Portuguese combination of therapeutic heritage, royal history, and earthy humour.