Our Massage Menu Sailed Around the World (and Came Back)

July 19, 20265 min read

Every treatment on our menu arrived in Lisbon by ship. It just took a few centuries.

Look at our menu. Abhyanga from India. Thai massage from Siam. Lomi Lomi from Hawaii. A suspicious amount of geography for one spa in Saldanha.

There's a reason. And the reason is that Portugal, once upon a time, could not stay home.

1498: The oil route

Vasco da Gama reaches India and changes dinner forever. Everyone remembers the pepper and the cinnamon. Fewer people notice what else was waiting on that coast: Ayurveda, a medical tradition already thousands of years old, with warm oil massage at its heart.

That's Abhyanga. Warm oil, long strokes, the whole body treated as one connected thing. The Portuguese built a city in Goa right next to this knowledge and stayed for four and a half centuries. We just brought the good part home.

1511: The kingdom of the folded knee

Thirteen years later, the Portuguese arrive in Malacca and become the first Europeans to shake hands with the Kingdom of Siam. Today it's called Thailand.

Siam had something better than spices. It had Nuad Thai, a massage tradition so thorough it treats your body like a map of roads that all need reopening. Stretching, pressing, folding. Some call Thai massage lazy yoga: the yoga happens to you while you lie there. UNESCO put the tradition on its cultural heritage list. Your hamstrings will understand why.

1878: The ukulele detour

This is our favorite one. In the late 1800s, thousands of Madeirans sailed to Hawaii to work the sugar plantations. They brought a small guitar called the braguinha. The Hawaiians renamed it the ukulele.

So the sound the whole world thinks of as "Hawaii" is, technically, Portuguese. And while the Madeirans were teaching Hawaii to play, Hawaii had something to teach back: Lomi Lomi, a massage of long, flowing waves, done with hands and forearms, like the ocean decided to be helpful for once.

The ukulele went one way. Lomi Lomi came the other. We consider it a fair trade.

The menu is a map

Follow the whole route and you get our menu: oil from India, stretches from Siam, waves from Hawaii, and the hot herbal pindas that Ayurveda sent along for the journey. Five hundred years of Portuguese curiosity, finally holding still on a massage table in Lisbon.

The caravels are gone. The discoveries now happen indoors, at a comfortable temperature, with a shower at the end.

Book your voyage. No sea legs required.