# Diogo Cão raises a padrão at Cape Cross (January 1486)

URL: https://allhistories.com/namibia/timeline/1486-diogo-cao-raises-a-padrao-at-cape-cross
Location: Cape Cross, Namibia
Themes: main-event

In January 1486, on his second voyage down the African coast, the Portuguese navigator Diogo Cão reached Cape Cross, on the Atlantic shore of present-day Namibia. Wikipedia calls him the first European to visit the area. He set up a stone pillar, a padrão, to mark Portuguese discovery and claim the coast. Cão had already left a padrão at Cabo Negro in Angola. The Cape Cross pillar probably marked the southernmost point of his voyage, roughly 1,400 kilometres further south. Its inscription bears the year 1485, which conflicts with the January 1486 arrival given on the Cape Cross page, and the sources do not resolve the discrepancy. Portugal never settled or formally administered the Namibian coast, which stayed a barren shore for centuries. In 1893 a German naval officer removed the original pillar to Berlin; it is now in the Deutsches Historisches Museum, and replicas stand at the site. Cape Cross later became a protected Cape fur seal reserve. At this point in the timeline (1486), no single ruler governed the territory (1486 – 6 October 1884); the Ovambo kingdoms, Herero and Nama leaders, the Oorlam captaincies and the Basters of Rehoboth held authority in their own regions, while Portuguese, Dutch, British and German traders and missionaries visited the coast and interior, until Germany declared a protectorate in 1884 and its first Imperial Commissioner took up the post on 7 October of that year.

## Why it matters
It is the earliest dated European contact with Namibia, and the site still carries a monument and a large seal colony.

Ruler at the Time: [Precolonial polities and coastal contact, 1486 - 6 Oct 1884: Ovambo kingdoms, Herero and Nama captaincies, Oorlam migrations, Walvis Bay and Angra Pequena traders - no single ruler](https://allhistories.com/namibia/rulers/precolonial-polities-and-coastal-contact-1486-6--1486)

## Sources
- [Wikipedia — Cape Cross](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Cross)
- [Wikipedia — Diogo Cão](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogo_C%C3%A3o)