Alcântara Maritime Station

The station was built to give Lisbon a quay fit for the great passenger liners. It was meant to be ready for the visitors to the Exhibition of the Portuguese World, in 1940, but it was only inaugurated on 17 July 1943, with the arrival of the Serpa Pinto and some 230 English refugees: in the early years of the Second World War, thousands of refugees waited on this quay for visas and for ships to take them out of Europe.¹²³ It was designed by the architect Porfírio Pardal Monteiro.²

Almada Negreiros finished painting the walls of the hall in 1945. Instead of the heroes the dictatorship celebrated, he painted the poor people of the river — sailors, fishermen and the hard labour of the women coal-heavers on the quay — and the paintings made the authorities uneasy.⁴⁵

From this quay settlers left for Angola and Mozambique, and to it came African students bound for the House of the Students of the Empire, as well as African women and men who came to work as maidservants and menservants in the homes of white employers.¹⁶ With the war, from 1961, the soldiers left from here and, above all, from the Rocha do Conde de Óbidos quay, a kilometre to the east.⁷¹⁴ RTP filmed embarkations at the Alcântara quay in 1961, 1962 and 1964.⁸⁹¹⁰

In 1975, as the colonies became independent, more than half a million people arrived from Africa, and the crates holding what they had been able to bring covered the quay for months.⁶ In October that year RTP filmed “retornados” (returnees) from Angola collecting their belongings at the Alcântara docks; in 1977 there were still crates stored on the quay.¹¹¹² The same port that saw the soldiers leave, writes the historian Cátia Antunes, saw the “retornados” and their belongings arrive, and these piled up there for many years.¹⁵ Today the station houses the Almada Murals Interpretation Centre (Centro Interpretativo Murais de Almada nas Gares Marítimas).¹³