The orange and the orange blossom symbolize welcome, dedication and a sense of service, evoking, in an unexpected connection, the history of the Portuguese Discoveries.

The orange and the Portuguese people
The Portuguese travels around the world left their marks. They left names, signalling a past history lived with the intensity of great ventures. One of these is the orange which even today, all along the Mediterranean basin, borrows its name from Portugal: in Piemonte it is called portugaletto, in Kurdistan portughal, in Albania portokale, in Greece portugales.
What would have led a plant that was already known to change its name? As it is now generally accepted that the sweet orange tree had long ago been brought by Muslim merchants from distant China to the Mediterranean. More than the plant itself - or simply a new species of it - it is possible that in the second quarter of the seventeenth century the Portuguese brought directly from Macao a more sophisticated method to intensify the sweetness of the orange. It is written in ancient memories that the first sapling of this sweeter orange tree was acclimatised by Don Francisco Mascarenhas, governor of Macau, in his Quinta do Grilo, in the eastern part of Lisbon.
What is certain is that soon the new orange tree became widely coveted, spreading throughout the four corners of the world and little by little replacing the other traditional species.
José Sarmento de Matos
Historian