The Padrão is a 52-metre prow of concrete faced in stone, driving out over the Tagus with thirty-two figures along its flanks, sixteen a side, and Henry the Navigator at the point holding a model ship. Behind him come navigators, cartographers, missionaries, a queen and the poet Camões. A temporary version in plaster and wood stood on this spot in 1940 for the Portuguese World Exhibition, and it was pulled down a few years later. The permanent monument was built between 1958 and 1960, for the five-hundredth anniversary of Henry's death. Cottinelli Telmo drew the design with the sculptor Leopoldo de Almeida, and after Telmo died the work was completed under António Pardal Monteiro.
The dates matter as much as the subject. This was commissioned by the Estado Novo, the dictatorship that governed Portugal from 1933 to 1974 and used the maritime past as its founding story. The same voyages opened a crown-licensed Atlantic slave trade that ran from the 1440s until abolition in the nineteenth century; the monument does not depict it. It has been argued about in Portugal for decades.