At the age of 31, Paulo Mourinha, who is intellectually disabled, is the guide for group visits to the Biscainhos Palace. The young man was trained by CERCI Braga and now reveals his cultural skills in a ‘journey’ that demystifies prejudices and raises the goal of social inclusion.
‘Welcome to the Biscainhos Palace!’. Paulo Mourinha, 31, dressed as a servant and with the elegant gold colouring and exuberance of the 18th century Baroque style, takes on the role of host for visitors to the Biscainhos Palace. He has an intellectual disability and is one of the users of the Cooperative for the Education and Rehabilitation of Citizens with Disabilities (CERCI) in Braga. But these days, it's on the wings of a dream that he's letting himself go. The dream is simply to become a cultural guide to the city of Braga.
Paulo is all gestures and ceremony. He speaks with great fluency and narrates in detail the history that the palace contains within its gates. He knows the entire genealogy of the museum like the back of his hand. He vibrates when he speaks and guides the groups of visitors like a lighthouse guiding ships on the immense sea. At every step and with every historical explanation he tells, he details curious little details that provoke laughter in the audience that follows him, room after room. He displays, with a certain theatrical splendour, the centuries-old knowledge that runs through the walls of one of Braga's most visited and renowned cultural facilities, which currently only receives half-hearted visits as it is undergoing renovation work, which will soon make the palace more accessible to all audiences.
‘In this atrium, which was once the floor of the palace stables, two vehicles are usually on display: the armchair - which was used to transport the lady of the house, with the strength of the arms of two sergeants, and the litter - which was also used for transport, but was powered by animals, with the support of two mules, one at the front and one at the back,’ explains Paulo, welcoming the visiting group. ‘Does anyone have any questions?’ he asks, in the manner of a teacher giving a lesson to a class. No. Few have any doubts because the detailed explanations Paulo gives are historical statements memorised down to the last detail.
On the upper floor, visitors are once again asked: ‘Does anyone know what this is?’. The cultural guide asks, pointing to a small iron utensil stuck to the floor behind the first door we find. Nobody knows what it is and Paulo smiles, discreetly, because once again he is going to enlighten the questioners with his masterly wisdom: ‘this tool is a foot scraper and it was used to clean shoes before entering the palace; this was because the streets at the time were not yet paved and there was a lot of dirt and mud,’ he said, visibly pleased to be imparting historical knowledge about the city itself. ‘Of course it was the richest and most powerful people who wiped their shoes, because the poor walked barefoot,’ he said in a serious tone, stirring up the two groups of visitors, employees of the F3M company and students and teachers from the Portuguese Catholic University - Braga Regional Centre, which SIM Magazine followed throughout this report.
It's in the majestic noble hall of the Biscainhos Palace that Paulo's guide shines even brighter, drawing visitors' attention to the scenes illustrated in all the tiles lining the walls. ‘These tiles depict the main entertainment activities to which the nobles devoted themselves, such as hunting.’
Turning to a large mirror in the centre of the noble hall, Paulo invites visitors to join him. They all look at their figures reflected in the mirror, but the guide draws their attention, because that's not the point... ‘I need you to look at what the mirror reflects... It's a painting in the centre of the ceiling, illustrating the martyrdom of a Jesuit from Braga, 400 years ago, called Blessed Miguel de Carvalho, which took place on 25 August in Japan’. The painting is 300 years old and was created by Manuel Furtado Mendonça. It is part of the context of ceiling painting in Portugal - an artistic practice cultivated during the first half of the 18th century.
Taking the floor again, the cultural guide at the Biscainhos Palace directs visitors' gaze to the gilded carvings in every corner of the noble hall. ‘Can you find out which figures are represented here?’. Again, silence. And once again, Paul's face lights up like someone who is about to make a great global revelation: ‘these figures represent the South American Indians’.
Guided tour with a talk on the fauna and flora of the majestic gardens
After looking around the interior atrium of the Biscainhos Palace from the balconies on the upper floor, visitors are taken by the guide to one of the rooms on the lower floor, where Paulo gave a brief talk about the garden and its diversity in terms of fauna and flora.
‘The tallest tree is the Virginia Tulip Tree - it's an American tree,’ he said, pointing to a table displaying the plants and animals that live there. ‘The Ginko-Biloba is a tree that we also have here in the Jardim dos Biscainhos and which, curiously, was the first to bloom after the nuclear accidents in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Experts say that Ginko-Biloba tea is excellent for human memory.’ ‘There's also a Magnolia Gran Flora here, which always has a green leaf.’
Paulo then went on to explain the countless varieties of aromatic plants, pointing out laurel, basil, rosemary, lavender, lemon balm and many others that flavour the Biscainhos Gardens each season. And once again, Paulo uses his eloquent rhetoric: ‘Does anyone have any doubts?’.
The director of Palácio dos Biscainhos, Maria José Sousa, who also accompanied the visit by the F3M business group, made a point of inviting visitors back for another visit since, given the renovation work that is currently underway, there are several areas that are part of the regular tour that cannot be visited, such as the service kitchen or the stables - which are always a source of curiosity.
‘We're creating better conditions and accessibility for visitors’
The museum, which has now been handed over to the Museus e Monumentos de Portugal organisation, plans to officially reopen the Palácio dos Biscainhos to the public in 2025, but the space's director, Maria José Sousa, stresses the ‘urgency’ since there is a great demand from tourists. Last year alone there were around 54,000 visitors to the cultural centre in Braga.
She points out that the intervention works include improving accessibility for all audiences, and that the palace will be equipped with a platform lift. ‘The aim is for us to offer a more up-to-date and accessible visit to everyone who visits us,’ she said.
‘We are also creating better conditions and accessibility for visits to the gardens with circuits and the integration of ramps to improve accessibility to the various areas in order to enable maximum enjoyment of all that the Palácio dos Biscainhos and its gardens have to offer.’
It should be remembered that in 2021, RTP recorded a large part of the series ‘Vento Norte’ on the set of the Palácio dos Biscainhos itself, having also travelled to places such as the Braga Cathedral and other locations in the Minho region, such as Amares and Arcos de Valdevez. The original idea came from João Lacerda Matos, Almeno Gonçalves and João Cayatte to perform the epic drama that tells the story of the Mello's, an aristocratic family from Minho, who lived in the Biscainhos Museum at the beginning of the 20th century. As well as the daily life of that time, the series also reveals historical aspects of the period that Portugal lived through, from the First Republic to the Revolution of 28 May 1926.
Maria José Sousa also emphasised the importance of projects such as ‘Empurrão Cultural’, which enabled one of CERCI Braga's users to have the experience of becoming a tour guide. Work-based training has opened up a new world for Paulo Mourinha, who wants to become a professional cultural guide in the city of Braga.
Paulo's dream is to be a cultural guide in the city of Braga, but it takes a little business push to make the dream a reality. Through specialised training, it was at CERCI Braga, along with a dozen other colleagues with intellectual disabilities, that Paulo was properly trained as a cultural guide, acquiring the necessary skills to carry out this project, which can, in fact, serve as a gateway to the labour market, demonstrating that, despite his intellectual disability, he is as capable as any other citizen of performing professional duties ‘excellently’ - as the visitors praised him.
It is at Palácio dos Biscainhos, serving as a guide to various groups, that Paulo has been able to fulfil his dream, although still only in the form of work experience. But his goal is to continue fighting for his dream and to be paid for the service he provides. It was precisely to help fulfil dreams like Paulo Mourinha's that the ‘Cultural Push’ project was conceived.
‘The fulfilment of Paulo's dream and that of other young people like him depends on all of us, but in fact each visitor fulfils this purpose because they bring Paulo's dream closer to reality,’ says Fátima Pereira, executive director of the Bracara Augusta Foundation (FBA).
It is a project that promotes inclusion between institutions and companies. The ‘Empurrão Cultural’ project has already been internationally recognised and considered ‘an example’ to follow. The FBA, the Portuguese Catholic University - Braga Regional Centre and the Cooperative for the Education and Rehabilitation of Citizens with Disabilities - CERCI Braga, have joined forces to create this project whose main purpose is to train users with intellectual disabilities and young migrants in order to promote their social and labour market integration.
‘The issue of working with museums, both the Palácio dos Biscainhos and other museums in the city, has been deepened through the area of artistic intervention and the use of artistic expression as an intervention strategy with our CERCI Braga users,’ explained Vera Vaz, president of the CERCI Braga Board of Directors. ‘The museums themselves were realising the difficulties and lack of knowledge they felt about how to receive groups with cognitive difficulties or other more specific difficulties and they were also asking for some support in order to simplify the language and the content covered in the visits so that they could be better understood by different audiences such as people with intellectual disabilities.’
The ‘Cultural Push’ is based on a strategy to promote accessibility as a whole. ‘It's not about physical accessibility, but about cognitive accessibility,’ emphasises Vera Vaz. ‘Our working group in Braga is extremely motivated by this project because it will encompass various cultural spaces in the city and the idea is that the project will have as global a reach as possible and that it can be increasingly disseminated and reproduced as a model for training and integrating different audiences, who require special attention during visits to museum or heritage spaces.’
‘Our aim is effectively to promote one of our main principles, which is the social inclusion of people with disabilities, but bearing in mind that these are people who have been properly trained to carry out these functions through specific training, as is the case with our guide Paulo, who is currently receiving these groups of visitors at the Palácio dos Biscainhos,’ emphasised the head of CERCI Braga, adding that among the young people who have been trained to work in the area of culture, there are also young people from vulnerable groups, such as migrants. ‘Our aim is for these young people to be effectively integrated into the labour market.’ In all, CERCI Braga has already trained 12 young people who are ready to show their worth in the cultural field.
‘We would now like this project to gain momentum and for companies and other institutions and organisations to be able to truly support the cause of inclusion.’
Lack of time, lack of knowledge about the opening hours of cultural venues, programmes and structures, as well as lack of money and lack of company are the main reasons listed by the population in a survey carried out as part of this project, said Fátima Pereira, executive director of the Bracara Augusta Foundation.
‘Braga will be the Portuguese City of Culture in 2025 and it is crucial that everyone is mobilised to get to know Braga's heritage and cultural venues,‘ said Fátima Pereira, pointing out that the visitors on the trip to the Palácio dos Biscainhos “will also encourage other companies and institutions to discover our cultural offer and thus also support the city of Braga in exceeding the expectations surrounding the ”City of Culture’.’
Fátima Pereira, executive director of the Bracara Augusta Foundation, explains that ‘Empurrão Cultural’ is an initiative that has tried to ‘bring Braga's heritage and culture closer together, as well as publicising Braga's cultural facilities to audiences who are part of our community but who, for some reason, have never visited our heritage, which has two thousand years of history’.
It was on the basis of this fieldwork at local level and realising the reasons for citizens' distance from the cultural venues that involve them that the three aforementioned entities joined forces with international partners to move forward with an intervention project that would, on the one hand, provide training for more young people with intellectual disabilities, while at the same time working to train new audiences, bringing more people from groups considered to be more vulnerable to cultural venues.
Once all these real needs had been identified, ‘Empurrão Cultural’ (Cultural Push) was born - a pilot project in Braga that leverages a wider project and whose main objectives include inviting companies to take their employees on scheduled visits to local museums and heritage sites, so that their employees, in turn, can then take their families.
‘The Bracara Augusta Foundation is also committed to the issue of accessibility to culture and the democratisation of culture, but it is also equally committed to the issue of heritage education,’ he says. ‘The project we've called ‘Cultural Push’ makes this triangulation between what our main goals are, taking cultural and heritage content to another level of proximity with audiences who, for various reasons, are further away and what we're really interested in is bringing more and more audiences to museum spaces.’
‘Our aim is to have greater cultural participation, responding to the reasons that have kept people away from museums, such as lack of time, and we are challenging companies to join this project, not only out of a sense of social responsibility, but also in terms of training the company itself to train its employees in this cultural area, mobilising their workers, during working hours, to go on a cultural visit, assuming the cost of the tickets,’ he said.
F3M company and Católica students applaud the ‘excellence’ of the guided tour
It was in response to this challenge that the Braga company F3M mobilised for a group visit to the Biscainhos Palace. Visibly happy with the results of the visit, Pedro Fraga, director of F3M Information Systems, S.A., made a point of declaring himself ‘a fan’ of the Biscainhos and that there is no visit he has at home that doesn't take him to the palace. Emphasising the added value that the ‘Cultural Push’ project includes in its essence and objectives, the businessman guaranteed his involvement in the project ‘not least because this philosophy is also part of our DNA as one of the ten best companies to work for in Portugal’.
For Pedro Fraga, the Biscainhos Palace is a ‘must-visit’ place in the city and he promised to publicise and promote the project with the Braga Business Ambassadors Group in order to ‘get the word out’. ‘We'll be back and hope to see Paulo and his colleagues working in this area again, as we were very pleased with everything his guided tour gave us and I'm sure he'll continue to do excellent work in this area.’
‘This is an extremely important topic because Portugal is 50 years since April. It's very nice to say, theoretically, that culture is a democratised good, but we have yet to really make culture accessible to everyone. That's why, for us at the Catholic University, culture is an essential element in the formation of any citizen. Culture is not a prop, it's not something superfluous, because it is part of everyone's identity, regardless of their economic, social or cognitive conditions. And if we can make a contribution by participating in this and other projects that may follow in this spirit, I believe we are making that contribution to building a more humane and inclusive society,’ said Cândido Oliveira Martins, a professor at the Portuguese Catholic University (UCP) - Braga Regional Centre.
‘It's a great pleasure and very motivating to be part of this project. On the other hand, in the area of cultural management, we believe it's essential for institutions to train their users in the area of culture and, as is the case with the Paulo guide here in Biscainhos, they can also develop certain types of work in terms of social integration,’ emphasised Carla Pinto Cardoso, a lecturer in Tourism at UCP. ‘This is an excellent way for us to make our contribution and, above all, to show our students what good is being done in the city of Braga in this area. For the tourism students, this visit proves to be an excellent example of good practice for future tourism and cultural professionals.’
