Reid's Palace, A Belmond Hotel

The Hotel

Reid's was opened in November 1891 by Willy and Alfred Reid — the two sons of William Reid, a Scottish crofter's son from Kilmarnock who arrived on Madeira in 1836 with five pounds and, over fifty years, built the island's first quinta-rental business into a substantial hotel concern. William died in 1888 before the new hotel was finished; his sons inherited the project and brought it to completion under the architects George Somers Clarke and John Thomas Micklethwaite, the leading English ecclesiastical Gothic Revivalists of the period. The building they delivered — a long, salmon-pink Victorian pavilion crowning a basalt promontory above Funchal Bay — is one of the most architecturally pure surviving 19th-century grand hotels in southern Europe.

Ownership passed from the Reid family to the Blandy family of Madeira (the wine merchants) in 1937, then to Trafalgar House in 1967, to Orient-Express Hotels in 1996, and to Belmond Ltd. (when Orient-Express rebranded) in 2014. Each cycle has been carefully respectful of the original envelope; the most recent comprehensive renovation, completed in 2018 under Belmond, refreshed every room and the suites without altering the Victorian footprint. The signal guests across 133 years constitute a partial history of European public life: George Bernard Shaw learning to tango on the terrace at 78, Sir Winston Churchill on his three Madeira painting stays (1949, 1950, 1959), the Empress Sissi of Austria during her 1860 Madeira convalescence, every reigning Habsburg and several Hohenzollerns, plus essentially every 20th-century British prime minister with the time.

The 163 rooms (and 30 suites) are organised across the main building's five floors and a small garden-side wing, with the better categories — Ocean View Rooms, Junior Suites, the Suite Churchill (the actual rooms where Churchill stayed in 1950, 1955, and 1959) and the Royal Suite — on the upper floors facing south to the Atlantic. Standard Garden View rooms run around 27 square metres; the named suites are 80–150 square metres each, with private terraces and direct Atlantic sight lines. The 2018 refurbishment retained the historic mouldings and chandeliers while adding contemporary lighting, climate control, and bathroom plumbing that meets the current European luxury baseline.

The four restaurants — William, the formal sea-facing dining room; Ristorante Villa Cipriani, the Italian outpost in the gardens; Brisa do Mar, the casual sea-level lunch venue; and the Cocktail Bar Pool restaurant for daytime — anchor the kitchen culture, but the signature is the Tea Terrace afternoon tea (since 1891, served daily on the south terrace at 3pm under the original cane awnings). Three pools — heated freshwater, tidal sea, and an upper saltwater — sit at three levels down the cliff face, connected by a small private funicular to the sea-bathing platform below. Tennis courts, gym, the Reid's Palace spa (with seven treatment suites), and the children's club (3–9) complete the resort infrastructure.

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Practical Information

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