At the presentation of Autonomia dos Açores – 50 anos de História, President of the Azorean Parliament Luís Garcia argued for a future built neither on pessimism nor exaggerated triumphalism, but on knowledge, science, innovation and the recognition that nine different islands must continue to construct a common destiny.
Fifty years after constitutional autonomy gave the Azores their own institutions of government, the question is no longer simply what autonomy accomplished. Increasingly, it is what autonomy should become. That was the central challenge raised by Luís Garcia, President of the Legislative Assembly of the Autonomous Region of the Azores, during the September 29 presentation of Autonomia dos Açores – 50 anos de História at the Cultural Center of Vila Franca do Campo, an event included in the official commemorations of the 1976–2026 autonomy anniversary.
Garcia called for the next half-century to be approached with “hope, ambition and realism,” rejecting both excessive pessimism and self-congratulation. His most telling formulation was also perhaps his simplest: “Not everything is the precipice that some announce, nor the oasis that others proclaim.” For Garcia, beginning another cycle of autonomy requires strategy, intelligence and an ability to bring together people, ideas and energies—including those who disagree. That challenge acquires particular meaning in an archipelago whose autonomy must serve nine islands with very different populations, economies, scales and experiences of insularity.
“We are so few that we cannot afford to divide ourselves and not listen to those who think differently,” Garcia argued. His remarks placed cohesion at the center of the autonomy debate, while presenting knowledge, science and innovation as essential anchors for the decades ahead. In his formulation, the Azores are not simply one community but “a complex community, made up of island communities.” Autonomy therefore remains valuable not merely as political architecture, but as an instrument through which those communities can pursue economic and social development with greater cohesion and solidarity.
The book itself gives historical substance to that conversation. An initiative of the Legislative Assembly developed in partnership with CHAM-Açores, the University of the Azores research unit, Autonomia dos Açores – 50 anos de História brings together researchers, academics and political figures connected with different periods of regional institutional life. The official anniversary program describes the volume as offering different perspectives on the path traveled during the last five decades; the September 29 presentation was entrusted to University of the Azores professor Luís Bastos, one of its coordinators.
There is an important idea beneath Garcia’s insistence on knowledge. Political autonomy gives a region the power to make decisions, but meaningful self-government also requires the capacity to understand the society about which those decisions are made. Demography, education, economic inequality, mobility, health, the environment, technology and the very different realities of nine islands all become part of the unfinished work of autonomy. In that sense, history is not merely commemorative. It becomes evidence from which the future can be considered.
The publication arrives during a year deliberately devoted to both memory and debate. The official fiftieth-anniversary program has included exhibitions, conferences, commemorative parliamentary sessions and the island-by-island series Conversas da Autonomia: Memória e Futuro. The constitutional framework of regional autonomy dates to 1976, the year of Portugal’s new Constitution, the first elections for the Azorean regional assembly and the installation of the Region’s own governing institutions.
After half a century, then, autonomy is no longer young enough to be measured only by its beginnings. Nor is fifty years an endpoint from which merely to admire what has been built. Perhaps that is the deeper significance of a book about the first fifty years appearing precisely as the Azores enter the next fifty: memory can explain the road already traveled, but it cannot choose the road ahead. That task still belongs to the nine islands—and to the generations that will inherit them.
Based on a Press Release from ALRAA. The photo is from the same source.