History

TEIXEIRA DUARTE

A 100-year history

“Teixeira Duarte – Engenharia e Construções, S.A.” is a Portuguese company whose origins date back to the individual activity of its founder, Engineer Ricardo Esquível Teixeira Duarte, in 1921, 100 years from the current date.

The company’s first areas of activity were water collection, drilling, hydrological work and great depth geological drilling.

Given its Engineering House character, it soon became involved in more complex works, having, from the 1930s, extended its performance to other aspects of geotechnics and foundations, executing works in some of Lisbon’s prime construction projects.

The company’s technical worth and availability of capable human resources, enabled it to have the opportunity to execute, in the 1950s, geotechnics and foundations works in India and concrete injections at the Biópio dam in Angola.

It was only in the 1960s, however, that the company extended its operations to buildings and in the mid-1980s to the infrastructure area, performing various types of works ranging from bridges, highways, dams, underground works. In the 1990s it also consolidated a position in railway and marine works.

This sustained growth resulted from the large number of tenders launched and infrastructure developed in Portugal during these periods, allowing Teixeira Duarte to expand its technical capacity, human and equipment resources, as well as production, studies and projects.

Internationally, since the late 1970s, early 1980s, Teixeira Duarte limited its operations to Portugal, Venezuela (since 1978), Angola (since 1979), Mozambique (since 1982) and the Macao Special Administrative Region (since 1984). Countries whose historical and cultural roots are close to Portugal

At the beginning of the 21st century, Teixeira Duarte extended its scope to other countries beyond those mentioned above, namely Algeria, Brazil, Cape Verde, Colombia, Spain, Ecuador, Kuwait, Morocco and Peru.

The cyclical variations characteristic of these different geographies allowed Teixeira Duarte to promote a rotation of technical resources and resources directly to these countries, where production varied, in the same way as it allocated studies’ central resources, projects and proposals to these various markets according to each one’s work intensity.

Both directly and through its branches and holdings in societies and groupings, “Teixeira Duarte – Engenharia e Construções, S.A.”, pursued, during these last 100 years, the positioning of an Engineering House that operates on the basis of its Mission and Values and, thus, continues to “Execute, contributing towards the construction of a better world”.