Padrão dos Descobrimentos

Landmark · BelémLisbon,Portugal

A 52-metre stone prow leaning over the Tagus in Lisbon, thirty-two navigators behind Henry the Navigator, raised in 1960 by the Estado Novo.

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. Henry the Navigator stands at the point holding a model ship, and behind him come navigators, cartographers, missionaries, a queen and the poet Camões. You meet it from below, on the quay, where the whole thing leans out over your head. It is a great deal younger than the voyages it commemorates. The dates matter as much as the subject. Cottinelli Telmo, who drew the design, had been dead a decade when the stone version went up. 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, and the monument does not depict it. It has been argued about in Portugal for decades.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The two flanks light at different hours — the prow points south over the water, so one side takes the morning and the other the evening; midday flattens the whole thing into one grey mass.
You reach it under the road, not across it — the monument sits on the water side of a dual carriageway and a railway; the pedestrian underpass from the Jerónimos side is the way over.
The lift up carries a queue all day — it is the only way to the top, and the line is at its shortest first thing in the morning and late in the afternoon.

Things to do

1
Go up for the compass
The lift stops at the sixth floor and a narrow flight of forty-two steps finishes the climb to the terrace. From up there the limestone rose reads as a design for the first time, with its map of routes and dates, and the tower stands downriver while the bridge crosses upriver. Below the terrace the monument holds an auditorium and an exhibition floor with changing shows, so this is a building you go inside rather than a sculpture seen only from the quay.
2
Walk both flanks and read the names
The two sides carry different people, identified on plaques at the base. Missionaries, cartographers, a chronicler and a queen stand among the navigators, which tells you what the monument's makers thought the story consisted of and who they left out of it.