The Centro Hospitalar Tondela-Viseu EPE (CHTV, EPE) was created on March 2, 2011 through Decree-Law No. 30/2011 by merging the Hospital de São Teotónio, EPE with the Hospital Cândido Figueiredo .
Its headquarters are located at Av. Rei D. Duarte, 3504-509 Viseu; the health units that gave rise to it are considered extinct for all legal purposes, and CHTV, EPE succeeds in all rights and obligations to those units.
The history of these two hospitals goes back to the 19th century. XVIII, with the preponderant role of the Misericórdias or Santas Casas da Misericórdia that appeared in Portugal in the year 1498.
There will be a brief review of the evolution of these two institutions from their birth to the present day.
In Viseu the history goes back to 1565/1585 with the Hospital das Chagas de Nosso Senhor Jesus Cristo (building currently occupied by the Public Security Police) instituted by Jerónimo Braga and his wife Isabel d ‘Almeida, near the Church of S. Martinho (temple extinct), to treat patients who did not exceed 3 months of dressing . The support of the sick was left to the Santa Casa as well as their admission. (Aragon, Maximian of)
Over time, it deteriorated and became weak for the movement of the population of Viseu and its surroundings, so Bishop D. Júlio (Julius Francisco de Oliveira) rebuilt and expanded it at his expense between the years 1758 and 1760; on that date there were two wards for men and women with 48 places in addition to the venereal; together, also a separate special house with Wheel for foundling children.
The same Bishop D. Júlio, in 1764, donated to Misericórdia, for the Hospital, the important sum of ten contos de reis in money. Santa Casa also received many alms from different Bishops and individuals; Caetano Moreira Cardoso, from the city of Viseu, bequeathed to Misericórdia an olive grove to S. Martinho, next to Quinta do Serrado to build a new hospital there; later, the Marqueses of Sub-Serra also gave an olive grove that existed inside the fence of the Hospital.
At the end of the century. XVIII, having already enough resources and with his Hospital being very small, Bishop D. Júlio decided to build a new one. It is called Hospital Novo or Hospital da Misericórdia (currently a building that integrates one of the Pousadas de Portugal, opened in 2009), whose first stone was laid by Bishop D. Francisco Moreira Pereira de Azevedo on March 29, 1793.
- Maria I, by provision of February 12, 1799, obliged all the Municipalities of the former district of Viseu to pay a real contribution for each pint of wine and meat arrátel in favor of the works of the said Hospital; many counties claiming their distance from the county seat, did not want to be subject to the contribution. Some were judicially compelled, others paid nothing, so, later, when the new Hospital was opened, Misericórdia refused to accept poor patients from those municipalities and only with an agreement with the respective Chamber would accept them.
It is unknown who made the Hospital Plan but it is known that Mestre Pedreiro-Jacinto Mattos de Vilar de Besteiros completed the construction of the walls by réis – 30,000,000 and Mestre Manuel Ribeiro de Viseu completed the woodwork and ironwork by 13,600,000 reis.
Construction went slowly and was suspended for a few years due to lack of money and because of the Peninsula War and subsequent Civil Wars.
The hospital received the first patients in 1842, and it is still unfinished. It is in this year that the great iron gate of the entrance to the building (where the date was put) is made. The frontispiece is topped by 3 statues that represent Faith, Hope and Charity.
In 1876, the beautiful exterior semicircular stairway was made, at the entrance to the large parallelogrammed landscaped yard that takes up the entire front of the building – landscaped yard surrounded by stone pillars and a beautiful iron railing, which closes the yard by three sides, with an iron gate on each of the three sides as well.