Sagres' Saga. Monument in Landscape, or Landscape as Monument?

With this text we intend to discuss the main theoretic issues connected to the problems of the conception and approval of public sculpture monumental projects, raised by of a series of four official competitions that were launched in Portugal, between 1933 and 1988, aiming to build a monument alluding to Prince Henry the Navigator, to be erected in Sagres Promontory, in the extreme south-west corner of the country. Covering a period of more than fifty years, because they retain the same thematic focus, these sequential competitions allows us to put in perspective the evolution and the involution, as well as the gaps and the links between the successive programs, and the winning solutions of each edition.