Nowadays, we all know of some villages which have grown up till become sleeping towns.

These are villages which seem to be progressing, but they remain empty like ghost villages when their inhabitants go to work to the city.

We also know other villages that, during their annual festivities and the summer season, become a place of enjoyment and a tourist destination. They seem to have life of their own but, when people who visit them leave, life disappears from their streets and shops.

In the rural there are also other town councils in which youth’s emigration turned them into hollow wrappings held up by land’s love of their ancestors. However, little by little these ancestors are abandoning their small villages and converting them into ruins, which seem to have a charm of what some day they were.

However, there are other town councils that do not accept this fate, without life of their own for the rural, that work day by day for their future, that are moving thanks to promote the creation of employment, thanks to opening to innovation and improving inhabitants’ quality of life, being careful with traditions, preserving their heritage and the environment.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am glad to be the mayor of one of these town councils: Paderne.

It is a town council with the capacity to work; it is capable of vibrating in the emotion of preserving the ancient and innovating intelligently to become a today’s town council.

It is a village in which its inhabitants, by knowing where they come from, know perfectly where they go.

D.César Longo Queijo, Major of Paderne