In 1749, a lake north of Sabará became the focus of a remarkable healing reputation. A Portuguese pamphlet described named people recovering after using its water, physicians discussing its supposed properties, crowds arriving and religious services being organised. Lagoa Santa’s tradition is therefore supported by an early written record of belief and activity. That record does not demonstrate that the lake caused the reported recoveries.
The surviving pamphlet
The principal source is Prodigiosa Lagoa, published in Lisbon in 1749, reviewed here through Brasiliana USP’s faithful facsimile. The library attributes it to João Cardoso de Miranda. The original title page itself presents the account without a printed author’s name. Antonio Cialli, a physician discussed inside it, should not automatically be treated as its author.
The text calls the water Lagoa Grande and locates it in the Minas Gerais mining region near Sabará. Its opening describes a roughly triangular lake, surrounding farms, springs, fish, vegetation and an outlet towards the Rio das Velhas. These are the writer’s eighteenth-century descriptions, not a modern environmental survey or measurements proving unusual healing powers.
It places Felipe Rodrigues’s settlement and small sugar-cane distillery there in 1733. His later cure stories are related retrospectively. The founding date does not independently date his first claimed recovery; the more definite chronology concerns the visitors and reports of 1749.
How the reputation spread
According to the pamphlet, Simão Pereira de Castro came to Rodrigues’s property in February 1749 over a proposed sale. Suffering from a longstanding complaint, he tried bathing and reported improvement. When the Carmelite Pedro Antonio de Miranda visited later that month, he interpreted the change as a benefit from the water.
Rodrigues then recounted earlier recoveries of his own, including sores and impaired hearing. The text also relates his interpretation of an animal with partly healed skin lesions and a further story about an enslaved man who improved after washing. These are anecdotes assembled to support the lake’s reputation. They are not independent, contemporaneous clinical records establishing diagnoses and causes.
The Carmelite carried the news back to Sabará and discussed it with Antonio Cialli, described as a physician from Rome. The two reportedly reached the lake on 19 March. The account thus offers a traceable sequence of conversation, travel and growing publicity, rather than an inexplicable discovery without named intermediaries.
Physicians’ opinions and unanswered questions
Cialli was said to have performed the chemical examinations customary in his profession and to have concluded that the water contained substances described as vitriol and steel. From those supposed constituents, he predicted benefits for a very broad range of complaints. The pamphlet does not reproduce sufficient analytical procedure or results to establish a modern chemical identification, concentration or therapeutic effect.
The author’s medical vocabulary belongs to its period. Historical labels for sores, paralysis, swelling and other ailments cannot safely be turned into confirmed modern diagnoses. Nor does a statement that earlier remedies failed establish that a later improvement was miraculous. The account supplies the writer’s interpretation of the sequence, not a controlled comparison isolating the lake water.
Another physician, João Agostinho Guido, appears with a more cautious view about timing and investigation. The pamphlet says he considered the cold season unsuitable for the baths and thought that one or two years’ residence would be needed to discover the water’s true qualities. Even within an enthusiastic source, there was therefore an expressed need for longer observation.
A catalogue of reported recoveries
Much of the pamphlet consists of a numbered list ending at 107. It gives names or descriptions, places of residence, complaints, lengths of suffering and reported changes after bathing. People of differing status appear, including enslaved people, freed people, children and office-holders. The list is evidence of how the claims were recorded within colonial society; the people’s status does not establish the reliability of a cure.
The entries are not all reports of complete recovery. Some explicitly describe partial improvement, an incompletely closed wound or greater movement without an asserted return to full health. One account describes an improvement followed by a setback; another says wounds worsened when colder weather came. Compressing the whole list into 107 medically verified cures would misrepresent its wording as well as its evidential limits.
No comparison group, systematic follow-up of everyone who attended, independent modern diagnosis or complete record of unsuccessful visitors is supplied. The collection is written to demonstrate the water’s virtues. Its many named examples make it valuable for studying a healing reputation, but naming a person and reporting an improvement are not enough to establish why that improvement happened.
Crowds, worship and a settlement
The pamphlet claims that three thousand people were present by 19 April. This is the source’s figure, not a separately verified attendance count. It describes people entering the water at different times of day and night, and expresses confidence in benefits despite their varied habits. Those passages show the extraordinary enthusiasm surrounding the place.
The religious response is described in practical terms. Permission for a portable altar was said to have arrived, with a solemn Mass celebrated the following day and a church proposed under the invocation of Nossa Senhora da Saúde, Our Lady of Health. The closing passage explicitly links bodily relief with spiritual devotion and thanksgiving to divine providence.
The text also discusses organising houses, streets, bathing areas and drainage so that waste would not contaminate the lake. Its closing dateline is 6 May 1749, although an earlier passage describes a municipal visit on 7 May. That internal chronological awkwardness is retained as a limit on treating every printed date as settled. It does not remove the substantial contemporary record of the developing reputation.
The tradition and the present lakeside
The municipality’s account of the Jubileu de Nossa Senhora da Saúde connects the patronal devotion with the eighteenth-century healing-water tradition. This confirms the continuing cultural importance of the story; it is not a retrospective medical verification of the individual claims in the pamphlet.
For present access, the official lakeside tourism page, checked on 13 November 2026, describes the shoreline as a leisure space for residents and visitors, including walking and cycling. It separately lists some neighbouring attractions as closed. The public-place reference here concerns the lakeside promenade, with no assumption of entry to closed facilities or permission to bathe or collect drinking water.
Assessment and map reference
The outcome is Insufficient Evidence for a demonstrated extraordinary healing cause. The pamphlet is strong evidence that a healing reputation, reported recoveries and devotional activity existed in 1749. Its retrospective anecdotes, period medical assumptions and incomplete follow-up cannot establish that the water caused the claimed changes. This is a historical case record, not a treatment recommendation.
The map uses an approximate lake-area reference of −19.64, −43.89 from the GeoNames lake record in Minas Gerais, Brazil. It does not locate a particular eighteenth-century bathing place, an exact modern entrance or an individual cure. The incident-year entry records the documented 1749 concentration of claims and activity; the 2007 facsimile and later tourism pages are source dates, not new incidents.
Visit Orla da Lagoa Central, Lagoa Santa
Official municipal tourism page confirms lakeside walking/cycling leisure space for residents and visitors; checked13Nov2026. No bathing/drinking-water permission or entry to separately closed neighbouring attractions inferred.
Official visitor information → · Access information checked 2026-11-13. Check current opening and booking details before travelling.
Share an experience here →Experiences at Orla da Lagoa Central, Lagoa Santa
First-person accounts shared by visitors and reviewed before publication. They are separate from the researched case above.
No visitor reports have been published here yet.