Pacheco, Duarte

(1900-1943)

   One of Portugal's outstanding civil engineers and the most energetic and accomplished cabinet minister in the early phase of the Estado Novo, Duarte Pacheco was born in Loulé, Algarve district. As director and instructor in the Higher Technical Institute, Lisbon, Pacheco trained several generations of urban planners and engineers and served in several key posts in the Dictatorship: minister of education, president of the Lisbon Câmara Municipal (City Hall), and on two occasions between 1932 and 1943, the premier minister of public works and communications in the history of the regime. As a relatively liberal republican in a regime of conservatives, monarchists and crypto-monarchists, and integralists, Duarte Pacheco was a political maverick but a highly respected, if controversial, man of action. His Public Works Ministry helped to transform the look of the capital, Lisbon, improve urban planning and housing, create the remarkable Double Centenary Exposition of the Portuguese World at Belém in 1940, and construct a number of key edifices for various institutions. In November 1943, he was killed in a tragic automobile accident. His influential memory still lives in the oral tradition of the new Portugal's Ministry of Public Works, and his work sets a high standard of excellence.