A settlement founded for care

Macau established a Hansen’s disease care institution at Ká-Hó in 1885. The remote hillside settlement began with only one or two simple brick houses. In the 1930s, the site was rebuilt and expanded to five residences and a chapel. The buildings were arranged for people who would live there over long periods, not for a brief hospital visit.

Ká-Hó became Macau’s surviving former institutional settlement of this kind. Its history is a history of residents and care, and it should not be reduced to the disease alone. The rows of homes, chapel and later community buildings reveal how an isolated institution grew into a settlement with its own places for worship, daily life and recreation.

In 1963, the Italian Salesian priest Father José, known in Macau as Father Wu, arrived to serve the community. He lived among the residents and celebrated Mass there. Together with them, he discussed a new name for the settlement: Nossa Senhora Village, invoking the protection of the Virgin Mary. The name marked a change in how the place was understood—from a medical institution identified by illness to a village whose residents had a shared home.

In 1966, a new Church of Our Lady of Sorrows was built. The earlier chapel, part of the 1930s settlement, became a recreation room. The change in use is important to the site’s chronology: a chapel did not simply disappear when a larger church arrived; the older building remained part of residents’ communal life in a different way.

As medical treatment improved, the village’s function changed. In 1992, the Social Welfare Bureau converted the women’s dormitory into Ká-Hó Home for the Elderly to accommodate recovered older residents. With that transition, the settlement ended its role in medical care for Hansen’s disease. The buildings remained as reminders of a community whose life extended well beyond its original institutional purpose.

After years of vacancy and deterioration, restoration began in phases in 2016. The Cultural Affairs Bureau repaired the buildings, beginning with one of the small houses; parts of the village reopened to the public in 2019. The sequence—from a few brick houses, to a village, to an elder-care home and a restored heritage site—gives Ká-Hó a history of changing forms of care and residence.