The proposed facility at Vinha Brava is more than a new building. It is the infrastructure that would allow students to complete their entire veterinary medicine education in the Azores, strengthening the University’s Angra do Heroísmo campus and its connection to an island where livestock and agriculture remain central to economic and community life.
For an island with such a deep relationship with cattle, dairy farming and animal production, a veterinary hospital attached to its university carries significance well beyond academia. The University of the Azores expects its new veterinary hospital in Angra do Heroísmo to be operating in 2029, according to Rector Susana Mira Leal. The target is also part of the University’s commitment to A3ES, Portugal’s higher-education accreditation agency, which has already authorized the University to offer the complete integrated master’s degree in Veterinary Medicine. Saúde Mais
The University currently provides only the initial years of veterinary medicine training on Terceira. The hospital would make it possible for students to progress through the entire program without having to leave the Azores to complete their education. Mira Leal said the University hopes to recruit through the national admissions system the first students who will be able to complete the full degree at UAc, with the hospital fully operational during the 2029–30 academic year.
The proposed location itself carries a sense of continuity: the former veterinary laboratory at Vinha Brava. The Regional Government has indicated its intention to transfer the building for the project, although Mira Leal says formalization of that transfer is still pending. At the same time, negotiations with the Government of the Republic, through the Ministry of Education, Science and Innovation, are reportedly advanced toward a program contract to support construction.
For Terceira, the project could create a particularly valuable meeting point between university education and the agricultural world beyond the campus. A teaching veterinary hospital can provide the clinical setting required to educate future veterinarians while strengthening the relationship among students, professors, veterinary professionals, livestock producers and the broader animal sector. In an archipelago where retaining qualified professionals is a persistent challenge, the ability to educate veterinarians from beginning to end within the Region also gives the project a strategic dimension.
The University is simultaneously pursuing another major academic-health initiative: a Centro Académico Clínico dos Açores. A multidisciplinary working group was formally created in April to determine whether the Region meets the requirements and to develop a proposal for such a center, bringing together the University, the three regional hospitals, Island Health Units, the Oncology Center and regional health authorities. Susana Mira Leal argues that such a structure could strengthen clinical research and the advanced training of professionals in medicine, nursing and other health fields. The Regional Assembly has also formally recommended development of the project.
Together, the two initiatives point toward something larger than the construction of new facilities. They represent an effort to make the University of the Azores increasingly capable of educating highly specialized professionals within the archipelago, while connecting teaching more closely with research and professional practice.
And on Terceira, that ambition has a particularly fitting geography. In a landscape where generations have learned about animals in fields, farms and milking parlors, the next generation may increasingly learn beside them in laboratories, classrooms and a university veterinary hospital—without having to leave the island to finish what they began there.
Based on a story in Diário Insular – José Lourenço, director. Photo from DI.