Lisbon Confirms: Memorial Honoring Enslaved People to Be Located at Ribeira das Naus

The Memorial Honoring Enslaved People will indeed be situated at Ribeira das Naus in Lisbon. This confirmation comes after a series of deliberations and changes in plans. The Lisbon City Council (CML) affirmed the location this Monday to the newspaper Público.

"The location is approved, in accordance with the necessary opinions and safeguarding that it is a special protection zone [of cultural heritage]," stated an official CML source in an email response to the newspaper. The chosen site is the Ribeira das Naus lawn, on the waterfront between Cais do Sodré and Terreiro do Paço.

This artistic project, initiated in 2017 under the Lisbon Participatory Budget, a mechanism that selects civil society projects for municipal funding, has seen its fair share of progress and setbacks. The initial location at Ribeira das Naus was proposed when Fernando Medina was still the president of CML. However, two years later, it was discovered that the land in question belonged to the Navy.

The latest proposed location was Campo das Cebolas, but it was also dismissed due to negative technical opinions from the Directorate-General for Cultural Heritage (DGPC) and EMEL — the area was classified and above an underground parking slab. The municipality, now under the leadership of Carlos Moedas, even suggested relocating the memorial near the Santa Apolónia Cruise Terminal, but the Djass – Association of Afro-descendants, the project's promoter, rejected the idea, arguing that the project "was made for that location."

Eight years later, the memorial has yet to materialize. In 2023, Djass accused the council led by the Novos Tempos coalition (PSD/CDS-PP/MPT/PPM/Aliança) of attempting to "sabotage" the project. The CML countered, assuring that it wanted to "realize the memorial."

The current location, the municipal official told Público, is part of the "municipal public domain." According to the same newspaper, the Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda is already "redesigning the memorial" with the location confirmed by CML this Monday. Titled Plantation, it is a sculptural installation consisting of hundreds of aluminum sugar canes, the "white gold" that was at the origins of the trafficking of enslaved people. Kia Henda won the competition launched by Djass in 2020, which involves creating a memorial to honor the millions of people enslaved by the Portuguese empire.