Padrão dos Descobrimentos (Monument to the Discoveries)

The Padrão was first put up in 1940, for the Exhibition of the Portuguese World, in materials that were not meant to last: a light structure of iron and cement and sculptures in staff, a mixture of plaster and tow. It was designed by the architect Cottinelli Telmo and the sculptor Leopoldo de Almeida, and stood over the Belém dock, on the axis of the Praça do Império.¹

In 1960, during the commemorations of the five-hundredth anniversary of the death of Prince Henry the Navigator (the infante D. Henrique), it was rebuilt in concrete and stone and inaugurated on 9 August.¹ At the prow of a stylised caravel stand the prince and 32 figures of the expansion — navigators, cartographers, warriors, missionaries, chroniclers, artists. Only one is a woman: Queen Philippa of Lancaster (D. Filipa de Lencastre), the prince’s mother.² The “Discoveries” — the name given to the voyages of the 15th and 16th centuries — were invoked by Salazarism to legitimise the regime and the nationalist ideology.⁶

The stone compass rose in the forecourt, with a planisphere on which the dates and routes of the expansion are marked, was inaugurated on 5 August 1960 and was a gift from South Africa, which joined in the commemorations.³ For the historian José Pedro Monteiro, the gift came “at a critical moment for the projects of white supremacy on the African continent”, when the two regimes were seeking to resist the “winds of change”.⁵

In mid-1975, the crates holding the belongings of those arriving from the colonies that were becoming independent piled up by the Padrão.⁷⁸ In 1985 it was inaugurated as the Centro Cultural das Descobertas (Discoveries Cultural Centre), with a viewpoint, an auditorium and exhibition rooms.¹