Salazar’s Portugal chose monuments over living people in the name of the past

Evidence

Salazar has had brand-new castles built, at great expense, on all the hills where there were ruins standing, and at Obidos he had no hesitation in appropriating for this restoration the funds that were to go to the maternity hospital, which, as a result, had to be closed; on the outskirts of Coimbre where a children’s community was to be set up, he spent so much money having the different types of old Portuguese houses reproduced on a reduced scale that barely four children could be lodged in this monstrous village. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 94

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Concrete historical case of the ‘serious man’ choosing the Thing (monuments, costumes) over Man — directly useful for the reader’s goal of sorting real people into the typology.
• SHARE: The Obidos detail — restoring castles with maternity-hospital funds — is exactly the kind of concrete absurdity worth sending to a reader interested in patrimony debates or Portuguese history.