SEASONAL TOURS | 1 NIGHT AND 1 DAY
MEMORIES AND RESISTANCE IN
ALENTEJO PLAIN:
FROM BALEIZÃO TO THE COMMUNITY VILLAGE OF AIVADOS
NEW DATES TO BE ANNOUNCED
In April, the month of festivities, we're going to learn about life on the Alentejo plains a hundred years ago. What would it have been like to live in this region marked by distance and the rhythm of the seasons? Today, the land is worked in a different way, owned by new economic agents and seen through a different cultural lens: with these protagonists, too, we'll try to get to know the shades of the history of the land in the Alentejo. From the Estado Novo to the Revolution of '74 and what followed, we get to know these experiences through the places where Alentejans met, where they worked, where they celebrated... We set out to go backwards, from the present day to the 1950s, from the new modernized agriculture to the assassination of Catarina Eufémia. Without “parti pris”, in the year of the celebration of 50 years of Democracy in Portugal.
Meeting point: Beja
Themes:
Resistance during the Estado Novo, Catarina Eufémia, April 25, Agrarian Reform, Salazarist education, Alentejo landlord system.
Activities:
Walk with the community of inhabitants of Aivados, Visit to the Rurality Museum Centers: Aivados Community, Almeirim School and Entradas, Participation in the commemorative lunch of the Aivados Community, Performance of Cante Alentejano Feminino.
Territories:
Beja, Baleizão, Aivados, Almeirim and Entradas.
Days and length:
1 night and 1 day, over a length of 150km.
Includes:
Entrance to the museums in Aivados, Almeirim and Entradas;
Participation in the commemorative walk in Aivados;
Alentejo singing performance on the second day;
Dinner on the first day;
Lunch on the second day;
Snack on the second day;
Accompaniment by a specialized Heritage Interpreter;
Personal accident insurance;
VAT at the rate in force.
PROGRAM
We begin with a group dinner in Baleizão , where we will encounter memories of life in the countryside and the murder of Catarina Eufémia. We will come closer in time and space to the old and current Alentejo latifundia, with the stories and experiences that were projected in the demonstrations of the time of the Agrarian Reform of 1975.
The next day, we head to the municipality of Castro Verde: we start in Aivados, a communal village since the 16th century . The lands lost during the Estado Novo were reclaimed by the people of Aivados on 20 April 1975, an occasion celebrated today with a walk followed by a community lunch. This is the ideal opportunity to discover a different way of life: what they share, how they organise themselves, how they look after their village. We pass by the memorial and cross the montado lands, in a moment of contemplation of the beauty of the Alentejo countryside and conversation with the people of Aivados.
In Almeirim and Entradas , we go back to the middle of the last century. We visit a School-Museum that preserves the school memory of times marked by rurality, we sit at the desks and imagine how people learned and how they taught.
Heading towards Entradas, the last point on our route, we enter the Orality Center , a museum that reflects the dialogue between workshop tools, agricultural implements and the sounds of the villages. We end our tour in the museum's tavern, between snacks, glasses of wine and Alentejo songs from female voices .
