The Chapel at the End of the Earth
The first structure Henry the Navigator (1394–1460) built at Sagres, Portugal, was a chapel, an intentional act that foreshadowed the spiritual and ideological priorities that guided his subsequent undertakings.
Not a harbor. Not a watchtower. Not the legendary school of navigation that may or may not have existed; historians still fight about that. Before the maps, before the caravels, before the first shaking crew rounded Cape Bojador into waters that European sailors believed were boiling and full of sea monsters, Prince Henry built a small stone church at the edge of a cliff overlooking the Atlantic and dedicated it to Our Lady of Grace.
I know this because I live twelve minutes from the church and surrounding fortress. As a Romanian historian who moved to the Algarve to research a book about the Portuguese Age of Discovery, I have stood inside that chapel, the Igreja de Nossa Senhora da Graça, more times than I can count. The familiarity of this place has shaped my understanding of why Henry built the chapel first, before any other structure, as an acknowledgment of the spiritual foundation beneath the era’s ambitions.
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Andrei Romanov is a Romanian-born writer and independent historian based in the Algarve, Portugal, and the author of the award-winning book, Masters of the Ocean Sea: The Epic Saga of the Portuguese Explorers Who Redrew the Map of the World. His work is held in the Caird Library at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, and in the British Library and the Library of Congress. He is a member of the Romanian Orthodox Church.
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