This article examines the decades-long dispute over creating a museological space in San- ta Comba Dão, the birthplace and burial site of António de Oliveira Salazar, the founder of Portugal’s Estado Novo dictatorship (1933-1974). Though geographically peripheral, the site has long been central to national debates over the dictatorship’s memory. Drawing on literature on authoritarian legacies and difficult heritage, the article shows how local development goals collided with national resistance and how prolonged state inaction shaped outcomes as much as direct intervention. Using oral testimonies, press materials and parliamentary records, it traces the reframing of the project from a potential homage to an interpretative center inspired by agonistic memory. The case reveals how disputes over a seemingly local site became a lens for national struggles about democratic identity and how the governance of places linked to twentieth-century dictatorships often depends on the politics of absence and symbolic contestation.

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