We are in São Pedro do Sul - the Region of Lafões, together with the municipalities of Vouzela and Oliveira de Frades. Center-north of Portugal, more or less at the same distance from Spain and to the sea. If we go a little bit broader, part of the Viseu-Dão Lafões region, placed right in the heart of Portugal, at least geographically speaking. 
 
I am in the radio, 50 meters away from the city hall, where I can interview the mayor in his own office, or take the car from the radio, where I started working permanently, and drive 5 or 6 km to do the same in the other municipalities. I can be part of the monthly municipal assemblies, and closely follow the development of the political programs. That is how I got in contact with what I call the “make-up” narratives. To answer to a strong process of depopulation, the need was installed to make the territories “attractive”. Make incentives to the installation of new enterprises, lower the rents for young couples, give money incentives for mothers who have new babies. In the tourism platforms we are nature paradises, magic mountains, unviolated stunning oasis in an urbanised world. The political and economic measures are aimed at attracting new visitors, new inhabitants, and new investors. With a clear interest, these narratives leave little or no space to talk about the issues and the struggles that the people who live here go through.
 
From the governmental perspective we are in the Interior. The Region of Lafões is part of the ‘interior territories’. In the main political agendas for the region, such as the one presented in the National Program for Territorial Cohesion - a program that lists “more than one hundred and sixty measures, mostly of government initiative, and an agenda for the Interior” (Mission Unit for Enhancement of the Interior, 2016), as it is possible to read in the first lines of the document with its description - this is how we are called. The Interior is presented as hostage of a vicious cycle that starts and ends with low population density. But the situation described doesn't correspond just to the Region of Lafões, it corresponds “to 165 municipalities in a total of 278 that make up the continental territory” (Monteiro, 2019). This means that the name that is given to us is the same given to ⅔ of the national territory. I call this the scratching line narratives, as it draws a kind of horizontal line that treats what is different as if it was the same and that overlaps to the specific identities of each place.
 
I call the romantic narratives the readings created by distance or lack of knowledge from urban or distant areas: as a romanticization of the rural. I would have close contact later with these perceptions when I joined the project LigAcções, a group of citizens and civil society organizations from the Center of the country and the Great Lisbon region that, in a collaborative way, aims to deepen the reflection on the asymmetries existing in the national territory (Project LigAções, 2019). Especially the more rural places of my region are seen as places where a still preserved antiquary of exotic and ancient behavior still takes place. Where a shepherd sits on a rock watching his sheep in the distance like he has been there since the beginning of the times.
 
Representations Installed by repetition make the Portrait Narratives, representations Installed by repetition. Abandoned, isolated, forgotten, depopulated, desertified. The Legend of the Savyor is the installed idea that someone with more knowledge or skills, that went to see the world, will come for the rescue of this places - in which local people are in a kind of waiting position, believing from time to time, but not with a lot of confidence, that now finally the messiah will come and a great change is going to happen.
 
These narratives play influence and power on the present and the future of our region and our community, in the possibilities available in our own present and in our perspectives of the future. And yet, where emigration and depopulation seem to be in the base of almost everything, the people that live here - my community, that I could also get to know deeper and hear closely - and the people that day by day continue to emigrate, seem to be the ones extracted from the game board, left with little political agency on their contexts and on their futures.

Read, represented and governed by others, who have the power to act, grant or withdraw possibilities, announce sentences of salvation or condemnation for our future, we - who are the recipients of these same policies - are drawn from the possibility to define, to inform, to adjust or to say when they don’t correspond to our needs. Ultimately, we lose the right to say who we are and what - in our understanding - makes us happy.