From Atlantic empires to European heritage: reframing Iberian pasts through the European heritage label

This article examines how Spanish and Portuguese imperial and Atlantic pasts are reframed as European heritage. Through historical document analysis of all European Heritage Label (EHL) designations involving Spain and Portugal, it compares institutional descriptions with scholarship on Iberian empire and post-imperial memory. Sagres recalls Portuguese maritime expansion; the Azores preserve traces of transatlantic shipping, slavery and silver routes; and Almadén supplied mercury crucial to colonial American silver refining. The analysis identifies narrative reorientation: imperial relationships remain partly visible but are reorganised around a European subject, territorial scale and vocabulary of exploration, technology, knowledge and shared values. The three cases reveal different degrees of visibility, from explicit acknowledgement of Atlantic slavery in the Azores to the compression of American extraction in Almadén’s industrial framing. Rather than simply erasing empire, the EHL incorporates unequal transatlantic histories into a selectively European genealogy. This constitutes a specific form of post-imperial rescaling whose moral and geographical effects vary across sites.