Carenque Natural Monument
protected area in Portugal
The Carenque Natural Monument is a fossil site of dinosaur footprints located in the parish of Belas in the municipality of Sintra, Portugal. It was designated as a natural monument in 1997 by Decree No. 19/97 of May 5. The site features a 120-meter-long trackway with hundreds of dinosaur footprints, including those of quadrupedal herbivores and tridactyl ichnites.
Background
The site was discovered in 1986 by Carlos Coke and Paulo Branquinho, students of Galopim de Carvalho, in a disused quarry 1 km southeast of Belas. It is situated in a thin layer of Late Cretaceous (Middle Cenomanian) limestone, estimated to be 90 to 95 million years old, containing the fossil record of over a hundred footprints of two quadrupedal herbivores and possibly bipedal carnivores. Galopim de Carvalho organized a public campaign and petition to prevent the destruction of the footprints, which were located on a site where the government, led by Aníbal Cavaco Silva, planned to construct the CREL (A9) highway. The highway was eventually rerouted through a tunnel beneath the footprint site.
In 2001, the Sintra City Council, then led by Edite Estrela, proposed a museum and interpretation center for the site, but the project did not materialize.
In 2021, following a legal action by Galopim de Carvalho, the Sintra City Council and the Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests were ordered by the Administrative and Tax Court of Sintra to clean and maintain the site, including placing signage to prevent littering and controlling access.
“Carenque Natural Monument” enters the record as protected area in Portugal. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Carenque, Natural and Monument can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q10332131. Authority coordinates are 38.774, -9.256. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1997, 1986, 2001 and 2021.
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This entry incorporates text from “Carenque Natural Monument” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.