Chapter 2.5 Portuguese Public Works Contractors During the Estado Novo (1933–1974) From Conjunctural Singularities to Common European Practices João Mascarenhas-Mateus, Manuel Marques Caiado and Ivo Veiga Introduction This last chapter, at the end of what aspires to be a travel book on construction in Europe throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, is dedicated to the very place where the book began – Portugal – to bring full circle the various perspectives on the implantation of reinforced concrete in the country’s construction culture, and in particular through major public works companies. Due to geographical location and historical trajectory, the history of construction contractors in Portugal in the 20th century has specifc characteristics that were simultaneously conditioned by the multiple transformations that occurred in other European countries, ranging from the specifc to the universal. With the PTBUILDS19_20 platform, the goal of setting up diferent virtual exhibitions dedicated to construction history in Portugal opened up the possibility of identifying, collect- ing and analysing a great deal of data. 1 At the same time, the quest to establish an innovative narrative on construction history honed in on the study of an often ignored but nonetheless primordial fgure that encompasses and represents all aspects of a construction culture: the building company, and in particular the public works contractor. Meanwhile, any historical study of the 20th century in Portugal must cover the Estado Novo regime, which lasted from 1933 to 1974 and radically marked contemporary Portugal over the long term. For all of these reasons, some of the most infuential companies in public works infrastructures were studied as the protagonists of the historical narrative of the construction sector in Portugal during the last century. On the platform, virtual exhibitions invite users/visitors to explore diferent general aspects of each company, such as the biographies of the frms’ founder(s) or timelines tracking all of the known constructions works executed by that company. For each frm, more in-depth infor- mation is given for a selected number of works, connecting them with other individual actors, frms, materials, machines, propaganda and technical publications, as well as legislation (Mas- carenhas-Mateus et al. 2021: 546–547). Each of the companies’ construction works are also georeferenced on the world map (OpenStreetMap base layer) and classifed into diferent types of infrastructures. 2 The group of contractors used as case studies was chosen on the basis of their representative- ness of the construction sector for the period 1933–1974 depending on their foundation date and the number of works/total sales they executed in that period. Thus, the companies analysed were (by the date of foundation): Soares da Costa (1918), Teixeira Duarte S.A. (1921), OPCA (1932), Amadeu Gaudêncio (1935), Mota and Companhia (1946), Construtora do Tâmega (1946), DOI: 10.1201/9781003368656-15 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.