Monument to Columbus

About

The Monument to Columbus (Spanish: Monumento a Colón), also known as Monument to the Discovering Faith (Spanish: Monumento a la Fe Descubridora), is a monument in Huelva, Spain. It is a work by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Funded via a popular subscription in the United States channeled by the Columbus Memorial Fund Inc., the monument, 37-metre high, was built from 1927 to 1929.

Erected on the Punta del Sebo, the confluence of the Tinto and Odiel rivers, it was inaugurated on 21 April 1929, during a ceremony attended by Prime Minister Miguel Primo de Rivera and the US ambassador Ogden H. Hammond. The sculpted man (leaning on a Tau cross) is sometimes described as representing a friar from La Rábida, yet it originally was described (including by the author herself) as a statue of Christopher Columbus.

It consists of a mortar structure covered by ashlar masonry (calcarenite).