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Monument to the Colonising Effort
The Monument to the Portuguese Colonising Effort, located in Praça do Império in Porto, was built for the 1934 Portuguese Colonial Exhibition, which took place at the Palácio de Cristal.
It was designed by Sousa Caldas and Ensign Alberto Ponce de Castro and dismantled at the beginning of the 1950s. It remained in storage for three decades, but in 1984 the then mayor, Paulo Vallada, who was also a settler, decided to rebuild it in its current location.
The monument celebrates the ‘Portuguese colonising effort’, represented by figures such as the woman, the missionary, the military man, the merchant, the doctor and the settler.
On 11 June 2018, the hands of these figures supporting the ‘colonising effort’ were painted red, in an analogy to the blood shed by colonisation. Messages in favour of removing the statue from the public space were also engraved on other parts of the statue.
This photo is taken from the website of the far-right party ‘Ergue-te’, in a post disparaging the popular demonstration initiative as ‘vandalism’ and in defence of the colonial monument.
The Monument to the Portuguese Colonising Effort, located in Praça do Império in Porto, was built for the 1934 Portuguese Colonial Exhibition, which took place at the Palácio de Cristal.
It was designed by Sousa Caldas and Ensign Alberto Ponce de Castro and dismantled at the beginning of the 1950s. It remained in storage for three decades, but in 1984 the then mayor, Paulo Vallada, who was also a settler, decided to rebuild it in its current location.
The monument celebrates the ‘Portuguese colonising effort’, represented by figures such as the woman, the missionary, the military man, the merchant, the doctor and the settler.
On 11 June 2018, the hands of these figures supporting the ‘colonising effort’ were painted red, in an analogy to the blood shed by colonisation. Messages in favour of removing the statue from the public space were also engraved on other parts of the statue.
This photo is taken from the website of the far-right party ‘Ergue-te’, in a post disparaging the popular demonstration initiative as ‘vandalism’ and in defence of the colonial monument.