Praça do Império

Ten years before this square existed, the Colonial Act of 1930 had stated in Article 2: “It is of the organic essence of the Portuguese Nation to fulfil the historic function of possessing and colonising overseas domains and of civilising the native populations”.¹ In the 1930s the regime invested in an “imperial mystique”, made up of schooling, propaganda and commemorations; the Portuguese Colonial Exhibition, in Porto, in 1934, and the one in Belém, in 1940, were the largest undertakings of this “collective pedagogy” of the empire, in the words of the historian Cláudia Castelo.²

The square was laid out for the Exhibition of the Portuguese World, the centrepiece of the celebrations of the “double centenary” — of the founding of the kingdom, in 1140, and of the Restoration, in 1640. To make way for it, working-class houses and shops in Belém were demolished.² In the centre stood the Fonte Monumental; to the west, the Pavilion of the Portuguese in the World, by Cottinelli Telmo; to the east, the Pavilion of Honour and of Lisbon, by Cristino da Silva; to the south, by the river, the Espelho de Água (Water Mirror) and the Padrão dos Descobrimentos (Monument to the Discoveries).³ The exhibition opened on 23 June 1940, the day after the armistice between France and Germany, and closed on 2 December; it is estimated to have had three million visits. The Colonial Section was next door, in the Colonial Garden.²

In the 1960s the garden received floral coats of arms, eight of them of what were then colonies.⁴ In January 1975, by the Jerónimos Monastery, people who had arrived from the overseas territories demonstrated against the discrimination faced by those who came from there: “Decolonisation Yes! Discrimination No!” (Descolonização Sim! Discriminação Não!), read a placard.⁵

In 2014 the renovation of the garden caused controversy, because the removal of the coats of arms of the former colonies was planned; in 2021 more than 5,500 people signed a petition against their removal, and the mayor replied that the 1960s flower arrangements had not existed for decades. The garden reopened on 14 February 2023, with Cottinelli Telmo’s design restored and the coats of arms of the district capitals remade in stone mosaic paving (calçada).⁴ In the debates about the square, notes the historian Márcia Chuva, the “human zoos” of 1940 were forgotten.⁶