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Sagres Fortress · 8650-360 Sagres

The imposing Sagres Fortress is the human extension of the natural cliff and, for centuries, was the main stronghold of a geostrategic maritime defensive system.
In 1443, the Portuguese expansion policy of the 15th and 16th centuries led Prince Henry the Navigator to obtain authorization from his brother, Regent Prince Pedro, to establish the Vila do Infante on the Sagres promontory. It was here that Prince Henry spent his final days. Several letters and his last will and testament originated from this settlement, where he died in 1460. However, due to heavy erosion and the passage of history, very little remains of that village: traces of a saw-tooth wall, a cistern tower, the foundations of a windbreak wall (today much restored and crowned with false battlements), the so-called “wind rose,” an enigmatic construction uncovered by chance in 1921, and the supposedly authentic ensemble of the so-called Correnteza, now part of the current exhibition area.

Everything else dates no earlier than the 16th century: the Church of Our Lady of Grace, whose reconstructions include the doorway, added much later; the bastioned wall, remodeled in the late 18th century; the former governor’s residence; and a curious building, rebuilt on the site where some, without basis, suggest the house of Prince Henry the Navigator might once have stood.

Yet it is the mythical aura of the site that appeals to the darker and more irrational side of our collective memory. This is evidenced by the controversies surrounding the architectural intervention of João Carreira in the 1990s, which sought to transform the built structures into a functional center within the great monument that is the entire promontory—respecting the place, but without stylistic subservience or historicist affectations. In the Correnteza (partially demolished in the late 1950s), while preserving the idea of a square between the buildings and the wall, an exhibition center and visitor facilities were installed, making the experience of this place of memory more meaningful.