VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages

Abstract

Portugal, was subject to one of the world’s longest dictatorships in the 20th century. Among others, the previous regime’s legacy continues within the contemporary Portuguese cityscape. The purpose of this paper is to analyse a particularly influential case of memory continuity in Portugal: that of Padrão dos Descobrimentos, or Lisbon’s Monument of Discoveries. The article is divided into three parts: theoretical, conceptual and practical. In the first section, the authors introduce the framework which will be used throughout the paper, explaining the notions of collective memory and the cityscape, showing how the two intersect through various memory carriers, such as cultural heritage. In the second part of the paper, the authors look into the question of traumatic memories that affect collective memory, using Paul Ricoeur’s and Hannah Arendt’s philosophical thought on forgiveness in the field of politics as a basis of an analytical approach to be used in the third part of the paper, the case study. Although not a classified monument, Padrão dos Descobrimentos is located in a Special Protection Zone and, in 2019, was visited by 300,000 people, 90% of which were foreign tourists. A recent act of vandalism against it reignited a deeper cleavage around the uses of history and memory, the Portuguese colonial past, and the role of monuments as instruments for the reproduction of nationalism. In this sense, through the proposed analytical framework, its critical reading becomes relevant, both for what it revealed and, above all, for what remains hidden.