The history of Parque das Nacoes
Parque das Nações sits on Lisbon's Tagus riverfront, a stretch once given to seaplanes, shipbuilding, and industrial pollution before demolition cleared it for the 1998 World Expo, which left behind the Vasco da Gama Tower and the fixed artwork Cursiva near its base.
Cursiva, an artwork installed in Parque das Nações in 1998 alongside Expo '98's temporary architecture, stands thirty paces from the Vasco da Gama Tower and has remained fixed at that spot through the tower's 2004 closure, the 2007 demolition of its base, and the rise of the five-star Myriad hotel and the Michelin-starred Fifty Seconds restaurant that replaced them.
A sail-shaped tower became Lisbon's tallest structure
The Vasco da Gama Tower went up in 1998 for Expo '98, the World's Fair that transformed this stretch of the Tagus riverbank. At 160 meters, it became the tallest structure in Lisbon, and while its observation deck stayed open, the tallest one in the country the public could actually climb. Architects Leonor Janeiro, Nick Jacobs and the firm SOM shaped it like a caravel's sail on a mast, with a "crow's nest" platform near the top holding a restaurant and viewing deck. At its base stood a three-story building that served as the European Union Pavilion during the fair.
The fair closed, and the tower's purpose closed with it. Office space at the base never found tenants. The building drifted into one-off use — corporate events, product launches — rather than any settled function. Both the observation deck and the restaurant shut in October 2004, leaving the tallest structure in the city empty at its base for years.
A whole district invented for the fair
A whole district invented for the fair
The tower did not sit alone. The land around it, an industrial zone until the 1990s, was cleared and rebuilt to host Expo '98, and once the fair's gates closed the whole area had to become an actual neighborhood. Parque das Nações, a short walk south, took shape as a civil parish carrying the fair's old name — colloquially still called "Expo" — with its own population, marina, and institutions built to outlast a single exposition. Gare do Oriente, the Pavilion of Portugal, the Oceanarium: structures meant to dazzle for six months were left standing and had to be given ordinary civic lives, offices, apartments, a resident's association. A marina with 600 mooring posts now sits where fairgoers once queued for pavilions.
The tower's fate — spectacle built fast, then quietly repurposed — was the neighborhood's fate too, played out at the scale of streets rather than one building.
A bureaucracy that outgrew its fairground address
A bureaucracy outgrew its fairground address
About 400 meters away sits the Institute of Registries and Notary, a body with none of the tower's glamour and none of its silence either. Its lineage runs back to 1945, when the General Directorate of Registries and Notaries formed inside the Ministry of Justice to oversee civil, property, commercial and vehicle registration. Decades of mergers followed — a Central Register of Wills in 1950, full autonomy for the commercial registry in 1986 — until Decree-Law No. 76/2007 folded the old directorate and various local registry offices into the organization's current form.
It settled in this fairground district long after 1998, issuing birth certificates, death certificates, passports, the paperwork of ordinary lives, in a neighborhood built for a moment of national performance. Where the tower's afterlife needed architects and a five-star brand, the fairground's other need was administrative: somewhere for a growing bureaucracy to put its counters and its queues.
A sculpture left standing after the sail folded
A sculpture stayed put while the tower changed
Almost on top of the tower's foot, thirty paces away, stands Cursiva, an artwork installed in 1998 alongside the fair's temporary architecture. But it has stayed fixed at this exact spot through every change around it — through the tower's closing in 2004, through the demolition of the tower's base in 2007, through the hotel and restaurant that replaced them. Pavilions came down. A luxury tower rose in their place. Cursiva did not move.
Within a short walk
The tower's empty base became a Michelin restaurant
The tower's rebirth took shape between July and September 2007, when its emptied base was demolished to clear ground for something with a longer future than a fair. Architect Nuno Leónidas designed a 20-floor, 178-room luxury hotel to rise in its place — the five-star Myriad, which opened in 2012 wrapped around the surviving mast of the old tower. In 2018, the space that had once been the public observation deck reopened as Fifty Seconds, a restaurant by chef Martín Berasategui. Within a year it held a Michelin star.
The sail that once looked out over an empty fairground now looks out from a dining room built for one of the city's most expensive tables. The structure raised to impress visitors for six months in 1998 spent the next two decades finding a way to keep doing exactly that.
The tower still wears its 1998 shape, but everything inside the sail has been rebuilt at least once since the fair closed.
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