As part of the commemorations marking 50 years of Constitutional Autonomy in the Azores, President of the Assembly of the Republic José Pedro Aguiar-Branco visited two residential homes for older people in Lajes do Pico. The choice carried meaning beyond protocol: half a century after Autonomy began, the strength of institutions can also be measured by how closely they reach those whose lives unfold far from the centers of political power.

There are anniversaries celebrated in parliamentary chambers, beneath flags and through solemn speeches. And there are anniversaries whose deepest meaning can only be understood by leaving those chambers—crossing the sea, entering a small community, sitting beside an older person and listening. On an archipelago, democracy has always depended upon this second journey. Political institutions may be constructed through constitutions and statutes, but their legitimacy is ultimately tested in the places where people actually live.

It was within that larger symbolism that José Pedro Aguiar-Branco, President of Portugal’s Assembly of the Republic, visited the municipality of Lajes do Pico on September 2, 2026, as part of the commemorations marking the 50th anniversary of Constitutional Autonomy in the Autonomous Region of the Azores.

His itinerary took him not primarily to monuments or ceremonial spaces, but to two institutions dedicated to some of the municipality’s most vulnerable citizens: the ERPI da Piedade and ERPI das Lajes, residential structures for older people operated by the Santa Casa da Misericórdia das Lajes do Pico.

It was a visit to institutions of care. But inevitably, it was also a visit to one of the central questions confronting the contemporary Azores: how does an island society care for those who grow old within it?

The Republic Arrives at the Local Door

In Lajes do Pico, Aguiar-Branco was received by António Simas Santos, President of the Municipal Assembly, and representatives of the municipal executive: Mayor Ana Brum, Vice-Mayor Manuel Pimentel, and Councilor Amílcar Goulart. Accompanied by Ana Brum, the parliamentary president visited the two elder-care institutions, meeting residents and staff and learning more closely about their daily work. There is something significant in that encounter.

Residential institutions are easily described through numbers—beds, employees, occupancy, funding, waiting lists. Yet none of those figures fully describes what happens inside them. They are places where aging, dependency, memory and human dignity meet the practical realities of care. Their employees perform work that is simultaneously professional and profoundly intimate: feeding, assisting, accompanying, listening, protecting and helping preserve a sense of belonging for people whose worlds may gradually have become smaller.

In island communities, that work acquires another dimension. The institution is rarely anonymous. The person being cared for may be a former fisherman, farmer, teacher, shopkeeper, neighbor or relative—someone whose life helped construct the community that must now care for them.

Fifty Years Later, What Is Autonomy For?

The visit occurred during the commemoration of five decades of Azorean Constitutional Autonomy, and that context gives it a meaning beyond institutional courtesy.

The history of Autonomy is naturally a history of political power: regional institutions, legislative authority, constitutional revisions, relations with the Republic and the long effort to provide the islands with greater capacity to determine their own development. But after fifty years, Autonomy must also be examined through another vocabulary. Health. Aging. Mobility. Housing. Education. Opportunity. Social protection. Territorial equality. Institutions exist ultimately to improve human lives.

The great achievement of Autonomy cannot therefore be measured exclusively by the authority transferred from Lisbon to the Region or by the legislation produced over five decades. It must also be examined through the capacity of public policy to reach Piedade, Lajes and countless other communities scattered across nine islands. A constitutional principle becomes meaningful when it reaches someone’s door.

The Additional Cost of an Ocean

During his visit to Pico, Aguiar-Branco also addressed the persistent challenges created by insularity, acknowledging the additional difficulties Azorean communities face in areas such as mobility, access to services and opportunities for development.

These are familiar words in the political vocabulary of the archipelago, but familiarity should never diminish their significance.

For people living on islands, mobility is not an abstraction. It can mean reaching a medical specialist, attending university, visiting family, transporting goods, obtaining essential services or simply participating fully in the economic and civic life of the country. The farther a community lies from major centers of population and services, the more consequential those barriers can become.

This is why Aguiar-Branco emphasized the importance of territorial cohesion and of ensuring that outermost regions possess the conditions necessary to confront present and future challenges. Territorial cohesion, however, cannot mean pretending geography does not exist. It means ensuring that geography does not determine the quality of citizenship.

Growing Older on an Island

The decision to visit elder-care institutions also quietly places aging within the broader conversation about the future of the Azores.

Older generations occupy a particular place in island memory. Many lived through poverty and isolation that younger Azoreans know principally through family stories. Some witnessed emigration empty villages and separate families across the Atlantic. They remember an archipelago before modern airports, before contemporary communications, before European integration and before the political Autonomy whose fiftieth anniversary is now being celebrated.

Their biographies contain much of the transformation the Azores are commemorating. To care for them is therefore not merely to provide a social service. It is also to care for living archives.

And yet dignity in aging requires more than gratitude for the past. It demands sufficient institutions, qualified professionals, sustainable financing and public policies capable of responding to changing demographics and to the particular difficulties of providing specialized services across small and geographically dispersed island populations.

The future of Autonomy will therefore also be written in places such as the ERPI da Piedade and ERPI das Lajes.

Proximity as a Democratic Value

For the Municipality of Lajes do Pico, the visit represented recognition of the work carried out by local social institutions and an opportunity to make the realities of island communities more visible to one of Portugal’s highest holders of national office.

That visibility matters. One of the dangers confronting distant territories is not simply that their problems remain unresolved, but that they become invisible to those who make decisions elsewhere.

Official visits cannot, by themselves, eliminate structural disadvantages. Nor should ceremonial proximity be confused with policy. But there is democratic value in national leaders encountering the places affected by the decisions made within central institutions. The Atlantic looks different from Lisbon than it does from Pico. Good territorial policy requires understanding both views.

The Measure of Fifty Years

The fiftieth anniversary of Constitutional Autonomy will understandably invite the Azores to look backward—to the political courage of 1976, the creation of democratic regional institutions and the extraordinary transformation experienced by the archipelago during the subsequent decades.

But anniversaries become most valuable when memory turns toward responsibility. The question is no longer simply what Autonomy accomplished during its first fifty years. It is what the Azores intend to accomplish with it during the next fifty.

The answer will certainly involve constitutional debates, economic development, European policy, transportation, sustainability and the relationship between the Region and the Republic. But it will also be found in quieter places: a school on a smaller island, a health center serving an aging population, a young family deciding whether it can remain, and a residential home where someone who spent a lifetime contributing to an island community now depends upon that community in return. Perhaps that is why there was particular meaning in beginning part of this commemorative journey inside two homes for older people.

Fifty years ago, Autonomy asked whether the Azores could possess institutions closer to their own reality. Half a century later, the deeper question is whether those institutions—and the Republic to which they belong—can remain close to every Azorean reality. Democracy is measured in laws and elections, certainly. But on an island, it is also measured in distances overcome, people remembered and doors through which the State is willing to enter.

Based on a Press Release-Photos from the Municpality of Lajes do Pico.