In 1983, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen published Navegações, a book containing twenty-five poems written between from 1977 and 1982 about the Portuguese maritime discoveries. Considering this book as a development of a theme Andresen had long been nurturing in her preview works, in our reading of these poetic texts we focus on four essential issues: the choice of such a controversial subject shortly after the 1974 revolution in Portugal; the intertextuality of these poems and the historical references in them; the significance of the sixteenth- century maps reproduced in the first edition; the concept of gaze as it appears in these poems.