Terra Nostra Garden Hotel

The Azores’ most celebrated hotel is the elegant art-deco Terra Nostra.

When the Terra Nostra Garden Hotel first opened its doors in 1935, Furnas was already a well-established spa destination. American merchant Thomas Hickling had created a private estate in the town- a summer retreat, cut-off from the world by a vast semi-tropical garden. The Victorians upper classes had a different approach – they travelled to Sao Miguel by Cunard steamship, exchanging the cold of a UK winter for the warmth of Furnas’ mineral-rich bathing waters, which they believed had therapeutic properties.

Seeing an opportunity, a local family, the Bensaudes, acquired the estate at the turn of the 20^th century, and created the Terra Nostra Garden Hotel we know today. Much of the character of the original estate remains intact, with Hickling’s Parque Terra Nostra still at its heart. The twelve-hectare botanical gardens are the finest in the Azores, with an extraordinary collection of camellias, cycads, ferns, and bromeliads living alongside native and endemic Azorean species.

At its centre is the famous thermal pool, fed by volcanically-heated aquafers deep below the Furnas Valley. The water picks up iron, magnesium, calcium, and other minerals as it passes through the volcanic earth, giving the pool its distinctive orange colour. The main pool was joined by two smaller thermal jacuzzis in 2016, which are fed by the same network of geothermal waters – the temperature of all three pools sits at around 37°C to 42°C. The gardens and pools are open to the public during the day – hotel guests have exclusive access from 4:30pm each day.

The hotel was expanded in 1989, adding the Garden Wing which sympathetically follows the deco-styling of the original building. Of the Terra Nostra’s eight-six rooms and suites, our favourites are these Garden Wing rooms, with their private balconies overlooking the semi-tropical gardens. The wing also houses the Terra Nostra Restaurant, an indoor pool, gym, spa, and wellness centre – where you can enjoy the moder-day equivalents of the restorative treatments which attracted the very first visitors to this beautiful island.