I Photographed The People In My Village

My village is in the region of Trás-os-montes in Portugal. In English it means between mountains. It is a fascinating region, very archaic, full of personality.

Modest houses, rustic, unheated, in a region where the cold is felt, apparently poor people who lived mostly from agriculture and livestock but who were happy. It was a region full of personality, some villages are still untouched by technology and progress.

There is portrayed a people without masks, far from the materialism of today, with their hands marked by the work, but joyful, to overflow with the most infinite humility.

Today Trás-os-Montes has almost all schools closed, ghost villages, abandoned fields and an aging population. Never before now have the marks of human desertification been so clear in Trás-os-Montes. The region continues to lose people at a rampant pace.