Termas do Luso

Termas do Luso occupies the elegant 19th-century spa resort of Luso in the Aveiro district, a village whose gentle wooded hills at the edge of the Buçaco Forest — one of Portugal's most revered natural and historical landscapes, the site of Wellington's famous 1810 victory over Massena's Napoleonic forces that became a turning point in the Peninsular War — create a setting of particular tranquility and aesthetic refinement that has attracted Portuguese aristocracy, intellectuals, and those seeking the restorative combination of mineral waters and forest walks since the Victorian era. The Buçaco National Forest immediately adjacent to Luso is home to the Palace Hotel do Buçaco, built in the extravagant neo-Manueline style in a former royal hunting reserve, and to walking trails through a forest of extraordinary botanical diversity whose centuries-old specimens include the world's tallest Mexican cypress and numerous endemic plants cultivated by the Carmelite monks who originally planted the forest in the 17th century. The Luso mineral water — one of Portugal's most famous and commercially successful bottled waters — flows from the same geological source as the thermal baths, giving the resort's oligomineral spring waters a national reputation for quality that extends far beyond the therapeutic baths themselves into every Portuguese household that has ever drunk a glass of Luso water.