As a group, we all share an interest: the individuality of each country’s culture. Therefore, we’re clearly nothing less than proud of our culture and appreciate the historicity of our city. Matter of fact, we’re studying history and see ourselves doing something related to this in the future. Being able to participate in something that enriches our and others’ comprehension of something that is part of everyone’s lives, uniting people all around yet demonstrating how we’re all different from one another, is a dream come true for all four of us.
We had a goal in mind and did whatever we could to achieve it: to do our best in the project, taking our time to research, select what is the most important for our presentation and place it on each according slide, summarized and easy to comprehend, without it being either too much or too little information.
To organize ourselves, we established proper roles and assigned tasks to help speed up the process as to make sure it was ready before the deadline and still a decent submission while overcoming obstacles, such as being unable to work, and even unexpected events that pushed us back. There was always a backup plan to prevent delays.
This holds such importance to us that we asked for collaboration from other teachers at school and took time of our Christmas holidays and free time to work on it, taking up quite a fair part of our schedule, especially mid December until right before Christmas Eve.
Since the beginning, we have been strategically thinking of ways to elaborate our project, starting with the topic we so carefully chose: where we reside, Guimarães.
This city is full to the brim with a diversity of traditions and customs. Us vimaranenses have worked together to build a city we’re proud of in terms of festivities, gastronomy, music, history and more, and that can be looked up to and used as an example for the others. We tried to capture that in just a few words and images, even knowing that it is so much more than that. It is sweat and determination from our ancestors that makes our city what it is today, and that’s what we’re trying to keep alive with this; Trying to maintain the pride alive through this activity, even if it causes just a slight change.
Guimarães was visited by around 3 million people during 2012, and half of them were international. The main reason 20% of them did is due to the fact that Guimarães
was elected European Green Capital for 2026, considering its exceptional performance in terms of sustainability. For this and many other reasons we think Guimarães is more than connected to the rest of Europe and, consequently, qualified for this competition.
Portugal was born here exactly 881 years ago. Many Portuguese civilians are unbeknownst to this fact owing to the popularity of, for instance, the capital of Portugal, Lisbon (Lisboa) and many other cities like Porto and Faro. In fact, lots of people don’t even know about the existence of Guimarães.
Accounting this, as vimaranenses, we’ve decided to take part in this competition as to benefit not only us, our families, our teachers, our school, but our city as well. We’re looking forward to the possible outcome of this, keeping a positive mindset.
Thank you for your attention.
Sincerely,
Matilde Machado, Mariana Paranhos, Gonçalo Ribeiro and Guilherme Vasconcelos.