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Holy but unhygienic - Letter from the Algarve by Frances Ruddick
• 22 Mar 2007 •
 THE language of cleanliness is so international that most Europeans can understand even a highly technical sentence written in Portuguese. Here is one example – ‘Elimina 99.9 per cent das bacterias incluindo staphylococcus.’
Advertisements proclaim the importance of oxipower, disinfecta, perfumado, anti-calcario and hidrovap – a steam cleaner that according to the promotion attacks grime on cookers, tiles, toilets, carpets and dirty car wheels.
Consequently, being a good Catholic nation, the slogan, ‘cleanliness is next to Godliness,’ can be accurately applied to the Portuguese.
This was not always the case and early in the 19th century, when the Portuguese royal family lived in Brazil, their habits can only be described as totally disgusting. Visiting members of European aristocracy were so appalled that they wrote down their impressions.
In Europe, it was recognised that lack of hygiene led to ill health and people had begun to adopt a cleaner way of life. In Brazil, religion was high on the Portuguese royal family’s agenda, whereas keeping clean was regarded with disdain.
When an arranged marriage was planned between the Archduchess of Austria, Maria Leopoldina, and the Crown Prince of Portugal, Dom Pedro, she was betrothed to a man who had developed the most repulsive habits.
Maria Leopoldina was twenty years old and a well-educated Habsburg. Her husband-to-be was infamous for defecating on the beach in Rio and urinating out of windows, both acts committed in full public view.
Maria Leopoldina travelled by ship to Brazil with a party of wedding guests and her personal staff. The climate was both hot and humid and the swampy areas surrounding Rio’s urban areas were swarming with mosquitoes. Piles of animal manure were heaped up in the palace gardens and guests complained of pungent smells and clouds of flies rising from the mounds.
Unsurprisingly, the European wedding party could not wait to return to the civilised world across the sea. Naturally, Maria Leopoldina was left behind with only recollections of the refinements of her hometown, Vienna.
Suffering from a dreadful case of homesickness, intimate letters written to her sister are deeply moving. She related, “My personality which once was cheerful is now melancholy. I never laugh like I used to do. I think of you a hundred times a day.”
Her husband, prone from an early age to drawing pornographic doodles, embarked on a series of torrid affairs.
Maria Leopoldina had a mental breakdown as gradually her ladies-in-waiting and finally her Austrian doctor, returned to the preferred surroundings of Europe.
Several miscarriages and a team of local doctors who she referred to as ‘barbarians’ compounded all her problems. Her mental health declined while her physicians prescribed a cocktail of invasive leeches, laxatives and emetics to make her vomit; she died in Rio before seeing her beloved Austria again.
Perhaps her early death was due to a frail and fragile disposition or – as seems to be more likely – marrying into the least fastidious royal family in the world. |  Return to Top
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