The Sagres School was an academic institution that was provided with the best cosmographers, geographers, cartographers, pilots and other “scientists” of the day, lavishly equipped with an astronomical observatory, and given the mission of teaching navigation to the rough mariners who left the Algarve in search of new lands. The topic of the School lodged itself deeply in the popular mind-set, as well as in some historiography. Even today, intellectuals and leading figures linked to culture and the arts around the world still consider the idea that there was a scholarly naval academy at Sagres in the 14th century a valid one.

Teixeira da Mota addressed the subject (A Escola de Sagres, 1960) in the midst of a cycle of commemorations of the life of Prince Henry the Navigator, before an audience that was largely made up of cadets from the Naval School, on the Sagres promontory itself. Right at the start of his talk, he bluntly said that the first part of it was devoted to showing that there was no such thing as a “Sagres School”. The basic outline of this position went back to the debates of the 1920s, which were to be renewed and taken to greater depth at the beginning of the 1960s and in which the naval officer and historian Teixeira da Mota was to be one of the authors who rejected the invasion of history by myth.

The position he defended was undoubtedly a daring one. However, by re-centring the question of the Sagres School on its symbolism, he left the door far enough ajar for the proponents of the more conservative positions taken within the structure of the New State and in the scientific milieus linked to it to be able to save face. We should remember that a very common stance taken in the official and unofficial discourse of that year focused on an idealised image of a prince who was a scientist, a wise man and a romantic and who, at Sagres, was the architect of the plan to reach India.

Portugaliae Monumenta Cartographica (1960-62), which was published in five volumes plus a small volume of indices, is in part a destination in its own right. It is the product of a lifetime of hard labour, effort, work and research on the subjects linked to cartography (geodesic science and topography), and particularly on the study of historical cartography. For its two authors – Armando Cortesão and Teixeira da Mota – it was a dream come true: to reproduce and study all the known Portuguese cartography up until the 17th century. This was the reference work of the 1960 commemorations dedicated to Prince Henry. Teixeira da Mota played an especially key role in the final volumes of Portugaliae, in which he wrote about most of the cartographers of the late 16th and above all the 17th centuries.

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