| Abstract | Abstract Abstract: This essay presents a critical overview of memory sites found in the Belém neighborhood of Lisbon, which has long been a privileged space for the construction of monuments to the nation’s five centuries of overseas expansion. In 1960, a replica of the 1940 Exposition of the Portuguese World’s imposing Monument to the Discoveries was erected there and, more recently, a monument commemorating the soldiers who died fighting in the colonial wars of the 1960s and 1970s was added to this site. While the Monument to the Discoveries recalls the Estado Novo’s imperial ethos, relying on an aesthetic that sought to suppress contestatory responses to the government’s colonial policies, the latter monument invites more nuanced interpretations and points to contradictions and ambiguities that were previously hidden in the Salazarist rhetoric of national unity.
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