Words: Patrícia Barnabé
As well as talent, these women have charisma and a presence that breaks with convention; they have intelligence, humour, and a constructive, modern and generous vision of the world. They are Portuguese women from different generations, who are creating a magic of which we can be proud.
Ana Lua Caiano
Musician

Photo: anELogico
She is part of a generation for whom traditional music has meaning again, after the search for modernity led by the Portuguese bands of the post-25 April era. If millennials were prejudiced against pimba music (a type of Portuguese popular music), our musical roots are now coming to the surface in several musical projects. One of the most interesting is that of Ana Lua, a 24-year-old, who combines everyday sounds with electronics, but the melody takes us back to our heritage and the more rustic, refined sounds. The EP Cheguei Tarde a Ontem brought her to the public eye in 2022, the year she took the stage at WOMEX, a leading independent music festival, the first of many to fill her young career. She was studying Communication Design at the Fine Arts Institution in Lisbon and doing voice training at Hot Club when the pandemic struck, giving her the space and time to transform the melodies that popped into her head as she walked down the street or fell asleep. She writes, composes and plays each of her songs starting with these melodies, surrounded by instruments that she instinctively crosses into polyphony in a computer programme. In this way, she blends the most rural with the big city where she was born, and the result is as familiar as it is fresh.
Ana Lua takes the stage without any tricks, just her voice, very clear and sure, accompanied by a synthesiser, a loop station and various percussion instruments. She has played at NOS Alive, MIL Lisboa, Sines World Music Festival, MED Festival, BIME Bilbao, Trans Musicales, and Eurosonic Nooderslag, where she was nominated for the Music Moves Europe Awards as an emerging artist in 2023, the same year she released her highly acclaimed second EP “Se Dançar É Só Depois”. Immediately placed on the music world’s shelf, she draws inspiration from the rhythms of Portuguese intervention singers such as Zeca Afonso, José Mário Branco, Sérgio Godinho or Fausto, by bands such as Gaiteiros de Lisboa, and by the project A Música Portuguesa a Gostar dela própria by Tiago Pereira, son of the musician Júlio Pereira.
On 15th March, she released her debut album Vou Ficar Neste Quadrado on the German label Glitterbeat, appearing on the cover surrounded by real Portuguese women of all ages, for a timeless song, while the video clips are signed by her sister, the director. It has been covered by the international press, including El País and Le Monde, the British magazine The Wire, the American GQ and KEXP, as well as the World Music Charts Europe (WMCE), a top-ranking by radio experts from 24 European countries, and has been considered the album of the moment in European world music. This summer, she will be playing all over the country and at the famous Roskilde Festival, in Denmark, as well as festivals in Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland and Norway. As she told the Rimas e Batidas website: “More than ever, it’s important to keep partying, screaming and singing”.
Beatriz Batarda
Theatre and film actress

One of the best actresses of her generation, capable of filling a stage, a screen, a chest with different emotions. Beatriz can embody an impressive and profound range of expressions, characters and lives, with a disarming realism. Whether in theatre or cinema, she takes us to the limits of human experience, cerebrally, emotionally and physically. She was born in London just before the Carnation Revolution, because her mother was studying for a master’s degree and her father, the painter Eduardo Batarda, was studying Plastic Arts at the Royal Academy of Arts on a Gulbenkian scholarship, fleeing the short and stifling views of the Salazar dictatorship. Beatriz debuted at the age of 12 in João Botelho’s film “Tempos Difíceis”, but she had already appeared in João Mário Grilo’s «Maria» and, in 1993, in “Vale Abraão” and “A Caixa”, two landmark films in Manoel de Oliveira’s long career. She wanted to follow Plastic Arts, studied Design at IADE, and made her theatre debut with Luís Miguel Cintra in “Conto de Inverno” at Cornucópia.
She returned to London to attend the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, where she excelled. Despite her natural shyness, she found great joy in acting and felt special and motivated to work with the best. With Cintra, she learnt that “acting is a point of view, and it’s enough to exist”; a motto that took her many years to learn, but which now she teaches to her students at ACT — The Acting School, where she is both a teacher and a member of the Pedagogical Board. The actress runs Offkey Production, which also offers courses on body, presence and immersion for artists from different backgrounds, and is a member of the governing bodies of the Casa Bernardo Sassetti Association, the talented pianist to whom she was married, a non-profit cultural association that seeks to respond to the void left by the artist’s untimely disappearance and whose mission is to catalogue, study and publish his work.
She is an actress for all seasons and worldviews. At the beginning of her career, she was hailed by the press as a promising newcomer, today, she’s a revered actress. She stars alongside Margarida Marinho and Rita Cabaço in the forthcoming “Último Verão”, a film by João Nuno Pinto about abandonment and family ties that follows two sisters on an old country estate, struggling with their father’s inheritance. She directed the actors in the series Finisterra, soon to be broadcast on RTP, filmed in Torres Vedras and directed by Guilherme Branquinho and Leonel Niel; set in Aljezur in 1943, it tells the story of an innocent young orphan who is accused of witchcraft and of bringing back an ancient curse that haunted the town, only to discover that the true evil force there is the Nazi presence in the area. Beatriz will also revive the show she created in 2011 for the São Luiz Theatre, “Outra Bizarra Salada”, based on texts by Karl Valentin, with Bruno Nogueira, Rita Cabaço and the Philharmonic Orchestra of Beiras, conducted by maestro Cesário Costa, which follows an orchestra in artistic upheaval as it tries to keep up with a cultural revolution, talking about breaking standards with love and the desire to save affection, with humour, laughing at prejudices and the culture of fear.
Beatriz Batarda uses the stage in a “ritualistic way, so to speak; there is a view of the moment as sacred in which this perception of another place and time takes shape. A kind of permission between the audience and us, they who come to believe and we who are there to believe with them. And the more theatre you do, or at least I do, the more inner freedom I have to explore my singularity or my eccentricity”, she told us in an interview. She says that there is an inner world in every artist’s head and that each show creates a new and complex one, “as is our life; it’s an infinite imagination, our capacity for provocation. With time, I feel freer to explore my body and the stage, but more afraid of the adequacy of my choices. I don’t mind making mistakes, what frustrates me is when they don’t add up”.
Constança Entrudo
Fashion designer

Among the most interesting names in national fashion, Constance is an artist-designer and a fantasist, which is actually rare in an industry that has been so taken over by the superficiality of celebrity culture and the simple counting of dollar signs. As a child, she was fascinated by Disney and drew all its characters; today, her collections are based on her own knowledge of textiles, colour, pattern, and experimentation. She always loved to write and study, and even considered studying Philosophy, Anthropology or Political Science, but she ended up entering year zero at Central Saint Martins in London, where she experimented with textiles, fashion, sculpture, architecture and graphic design; her teachers told her then that she was born a textile designer due to her unusual sensitivity to materials and colour play. She graduated in Textile Design in 2017, far from being fascinated by the world of fashion, realizing “it could be so much more”, “it wasn’t a world I admired much, and I still don’t”, she admitted to us in an interview.
Constança started out working with brands such as Balmain, Peter Pilotto and the Portuguese duo Marques Almeida, and, in 2018, she launched her brand, catching everyone’s attention at ModaLisboa for the originality of the textiles in strong patterns, deconstructed and with recycled threads, her own off-loom weaving technique, done thread by thread, directly on the mould and on the garment, which she calls unwoven and has been perfecting.
For her, the sky is the limit, which is why she presents her collections whenever she wants, in fashion shows as well as in living paintings: “My mind isn’t conditioned to think about looks, look 1, look 2, look 3”. The 2025 collection, to be presented in September, has been in the works since early 2024. “This year, for the first time, we will only present one collection a year. This is because we needed more time to rethink our sustainability strategy, especially where suppliers and materials are concerned”, she says. Her Spring-Summer 2024 collection is on sale in luxury stores in Portugal, at Parlamento, and in Canada, the United States, Japan, China and Australia. At the same time, Constança is launching pop-ups of its brand in several cities around the world, from Lisbon to London, Paris, New York and Mexico City, where she organised an event during the ZONAMACO art fair.
She starts with a theme, travels through the work of other artists, and researches until she finds a palette of colours and materials, makes collages, paintings and drawings that are idealised in moodboards, and then writes about the collection until it comes to life. The fashion designer also collaborates with artists from different fields, the most recent being a project with the choreographer João dos Santos Martins, presented at Culturgest, “Vida e Obra”, about the relationship between practice and discourse and the contradictions inherent in the activity of dancing: “We are both very attached to the use of colour, and it made sense to create blocks of colour that unfold with movement throughout the performance”, and the idea, although far from obvious, is that “the costumes reveal this passage of time, always bringing innovation”. She has also collaborated with the Dutch Studio Hagel on an experimental shoe project and is a consultant for the Portuguese espadrilles brand Paez. Constança is currently expanding her Studio project and starting a project in the field of interiors, which she has been ‘flirting with’ for some time. “We are working on several design pieces and textile design projects for restaurants and an architecture atelier”. She also finds time to teach secondary school and is the coordinator of the Cambridge International Education Art and Design course at Guadalupe College in Costa Rica.
She doesn’t design for stereotypical women, she loves pop culture for its fun and popular side, and has dressed celebrities such as Ashley Graham, Pink Panthers (album cover), Devon Lee, Sydney Carlson, Jourdan Dunn and Kelly Bailey. For her, the line between good and bad taste is something to be refined, and she doesn’t care about sobriety. She is a daughter of the Internet, with an insatiable curiosity, and an heiress to the black humour of the English McQueen or Galliano: “It’s important to look at things with humour, otherwise, it’s just boring. There are so many disappointments, irony lightens the soul”.
Marlene Vieira
Chef

It’s impossible to imagine haute cuisine in Portugal without Marlene Vieira, one of the few women sitting on the podium of the country’s best chefs, if not the only one who isn’t considered an improved cook. A woman from the north, as she never tires of saying, she was born in Maia in 1980 and at the age of 12 she was already asking her parents to let her work in a restaurant during the summer holidays. It was a revelation, and she never left the kitchen again, spending hours and hours preparing and perfecting dishes. At the age of 16, she decided not to join the army but to go to the Hotel School in Santa Maria da Feira. Considered the best student, she won a scholarship to do an internship at a school in Porto. Marlene made her debut in a boutique hotel in Vila do Conde, but she soon left for New York, where she worked for two years at the Portuguese restaurant Alfama, in Manhattan. After returning to the country, she gained experience in several five-star restaurants and hotels and worked at De Gusto, in Matosinhos, with chef Vítor Claro, who was introducing to Portugal the molecular cuisine created by the Catalan Ferran Adriá, which was then exploding all over the world. Marlene became head chef at the Westin Campo Real and helped to open the Convento do Espinheiro, “I was like a tank, I opened the way”, she laughs, sitting at her ZunZum, in the sixth edition (of 12 events) of the four-handed dinners to which she invites other chefs, this time the Algarvian Rui Sequeira: “a way of celebrating the Portuguese flavours and ingredients”. The most difficult was the opening of the Sheraton restaurant in Porto “because it tore everything apart: the hotels only had French cuisine, and this one opened with traditional Portuguese luxury cuisine”, she recalls.
In 2009, she participated in the Chef of the Year competition, with a cabidela (a typical Portuguese dish made with poultry) in molecular cuisine, and chef Luís Baena, who was on the jury, invited her to his Manifesto. He became a reference, and she learned from him how to take risks: “Baena is a mind that is very much ahead of its time, I was very lucky to have crossed paths with him. He was an executive chef, he didn’t cook, he asked others to test his recipes, he was the best taster. He made a big impression on me, but it was crazy!”. Since then, Marlene has done so many things at once.
She taught for seven years until an Angolan investor challenged her to create her snacks and in 2012, she opened Avenue, “an incredible space for creativity, but he wanted margins, more than a restaurant”. One of her customers, a Brazilian screenwriter, took over the business: “I thought: I will ask him to buy the restaurant, maybe it will stick. And it did! I then decided to do Portuguese fine dining”. “It’s curious”, she adds, “first it was an Angolan and then a Brazilian, the Portuguese didn’t give us the credit, especially the women, forget it, they couldn’t have a leading voice”. Even though it was in the kitchen that the women lived all their lives. “Sometimes, I would go to the table to see if everything was all right, and they’d say: ‘Yes, yes, call the Chef’; and I’d to take a deep breath, but I’m from the North, aren’t I? Sometimes, I didn’t take a deep breath and answered badly”, she shrugs. “But I think I am an inspiration to other women”.
Then she was featured by Time Out, with a carabineiro dish served on her corner in Ribeira Market, which was a success. She opened a catering company, published two books of sweet recipes and returned to television from time to time, as a teacher at RTP1’s Culinary Academy, as a presenter in the History of National Gastronomy dedicated to monastery sweets, and as a judge on Masterchef. In 2020, during the pandemic, she opened ZunZum and, two years later, just next door, the Marlene, a space for experimentation and fine dining, with an open-plan kitchen, “vibrant and rebellious, with a strong attraction to what’s new”, where she only serves tasting dinners. Today, she even has wines named after her. “The other day, I saw a quote from Anthony Bourdain saying that all Chefs have generosity in their hearts. We essentially work for one another, and we are satisfied with just an ‘it was a great’”. Cooking is pure love, it has physicality, it’s dedication. “As in music and art, there’s a hormone that is released and causes an abundance of happiness”.
Patrícia Reis
Writer

The newspapers Independente and Expresso, the magazines Sábado and Times, television, the women’s magazines Marie Claire and Elle, and, more recently, Egoísta (the art magazine of the Casino Estoril) weren’t enough to satisfy her desire to tell stories. A desire born from observing people, life, fragility, and poetry. A mother of two boys, she soon divided her time between caring and writing, one breath at a time. Patrícia always starts a book after she has already started another, “so as to not find myself empty, without characters”, she says. Journalism is still Patrícia’s way of looking at the world, even if it gives up its talents to the young and the cheap (as boys do with their girlfriends), or to social media commentators who make too much noise. As her youngest son points out, “to think, you need to write”. That’s why she knew from an early age that she wanted to write books, and journalism was only a gateway. And once again: “Today, I would have reacted differently in some situations, but at the time I was crying and thought I had to hold a national press conference to clarify the matter (laughs). The world of journalism is tough, very tough, and if you’re a young and blonde woman, pufff”.
Patrícia Reis was born in Lisbon, in 1970, has a degree in History and a master’s in Religious Sciences, and left home very early to become financially independent. During her time as a journalist, she wrote several novels and children’s books, and her themes have always revolved around the construction of identity, “based on things that happen to you, a trauma, a choice”, she describes. Today, her writing takes her to other worlds, including those of the actor Vasco Santana, the journalist Maria Antónia Palla (together with her), the singer Simone Oliveira, and, more recently, the writer and poet Maria Teresa Horta, through the much-acclaimed biography of her: “She’s probably the person I know who has suffered the most in this country for never having given up saying: I’m a feminist. She doesn’t have the awards she should have, the international projection, the career, she’s been penalised”. Patrícia Reis too, inevitably and intelligently, wears the shirt of feminism and also has a podcast on gender issues with Paula Cosme Pinto: “Being a feminist it’s not a question of gender, it’s about intelligence, a basic question of education”. She warns that the MeToo’s movement worst enemies are the women themselves: “There’s nothing worse than a macho woman, and in this country, macho women are a cliché. When a woman gets to a place of power, she usually starts doing what the boys do to fit in. I really have very little respect for that”.
After the closure of Egoísta magazine, which she coordinated with distinction, as well as her books, which she publishes with different publishers, Patrícia Reis is now curating the solo exhibition of the photographer Alfredo Cunha, O Tempo de todas as Perguntas, which will be on show at the Eugénio de Almeida Foundation in Lisbon until October. It tells the story of the 1970s in Portugal through thirty-six photographs, some of which were never published before, all from the point of view of those who, like him, were children on the 25th of April 1974. From November until 2025, the same cultural centre will host a retrospective of Ana Vidigal’s work, also curated by Reis. These are four decades of artistic production, layers and layers of different sensations and multiple dimensions of human experience that she has always masterfully organised.
Her acute sensibility, her greatest strength and the fuel of her writing, and her unwillingness to tiptoe have brought her to a rare but hard-earned place of prominence and respect. “I’ve never had much ambition, I don’t have a competitive cell in my body, I am the kind of person who plays Pictionary and helps the other team to draw. I don’t like games; I don’t care if I win or if I am the centre of attention”. But she’s never let go of the magic: “I’ve had a lot of magic in my life, I’ve always been able to imagine everything, there are no impossibilities, you know? It’s like what Dalai Lama said: ‘Nothing is impossible, but there is a limited perception of what is possible’. Everything could be done at any time and that was very fortunate, I’m very grateful, and I miss it”. People are very lonely these days. “Virgílio Ferreira once said something beautiful: ‘The novel is a screen behind which we undress’”. It’s in this striptease that the writer finds her world of expression in a world that seems increasingly detached from its inner layers. She once told us in an interview that you never give up, “you change your world. Many years ago, a writer said to me: ‘I want to be known in the world’. I replied: ‘I want to be known in my street so that I can leave the café unpaid because I left my wallet at home’”.
Rita Soares
Hospitality and wines, Malhadinha Nova

Photo: Frederic Ducout
Born in Lisbon, she studied education at the João de Deus School of Education. Her dreams have always led her to art and education, and she is passionate about “life and creation, finding constant inspiration in nature, art, and tradition”, she says. Her initial idea was to work in Special Education and Child Psychology, and she is proud to have had great teachers in her training, “One of my great inspirations was the poet Matilde Rosa Araújo, I carry with me her delicacy, simplicity and constant desire to educate creatively. What she taught me led me to invest during my career in various artistic training programmes, piano and various AR.CO courses, scientific illustration and ceramics”. Rita is a box of good surprises.
Malhadinha Nova was born in the same year as her firstborn, Francisca, and today she has four children. It was built on the site of a prosperous farm, which even had an inn (“they say in the village”), where Monte da Peceguina is today. “I believe that life is a cycle, and it was not by chance that Malhadinha found us, after being abandoned for more than 30 years. It’s a place with very special endogenous characteristics”. She, her husband and her brothers-in-law, who work in the wine trade, set out to develop a life project “in this enchanted place” in the Baixo Alentejo based on “strong family values and a great desire to leave behind a legacy. Perhaps that’s why the path has been so delicate and why we feel a strong need to share it”.
The Herdade da Malhadinha Nova began as a small rural tourism establishment in Albernoa, a building that remains as romantic and welcoming to guests as ever, but which has since flourished with the recovery of other ‘ruins’. Today, it offers a variety of sophisticated accommodations scattered throughout the natural environment that the Soares family has always wanted to preserve. They have combined hospitality with their love of the land, agriculture and wine, which is in the family and which they also run, in addition to Malhadinha, the Garrafeira Soares. “We are the best of friends, and we decided together that as well as selling wines we wanted to produce and to produce is to create, it’s a world apart that requires a lot of dedication, a lot of care and constant attention”. That’s how the brands Malhadinha and Peceguina came about, “with strong foundations and deep roots” and a “growing and continuous passion, an infinite world of knowledge closely connected to our history and tradition, which is why we are always learning and trying to improve, knowing more and better what is being done in the world and constantly adapting to our reality”.
Rita Soares walks around this vast property every day, taking care of a little bit of everything, from the management to the beautiful minimalist décor, which she built with the help of local artisans and artists. “At the moment, everything we have developed is very much based on sustainability in all the different areas. Well-being is at the root of the spa [designed by the architect Manuel Aires Mateus] and all the experiences we have developed around it, all of which have a strong educational component and, therefore, everything we create is increasingly concerned with being a learning experience for those who visit us, and not just an occupational activity”. She has always wanted Malhadinha Nova to be a place of generosity: with nature, the plants and animals, which it protects, but also with people, its employees, and the surrounding community, with an underlying commitment to sustainability. «Leave a legacy of embracing self-sustainability, where time, nature, and space are the ultimate expression of luxury and happiness», reads the website.
They have recently bought another piece of land with some ruins next to the existing one, and what comes next will be “increasingly innovative and based on our deep environmental concerns”, she assures. They are currently mapping all their best practices in order to apply for a B Corp certification. “Malhadinha is a place that we take care of, with everything that lives there, and a great responsibility; its future, and that of its inhabitants, depends on our choices and the way we manage it, so the care we give to every detail is infinite and that’s why we feel the constant need to share it”. Once again, they want to be an example: “The path is delicate and deep. We want to be an example of luxury, only if luxury can be the contemplation of a preserved natural space, while drinking a glass of wine produced in Malhadinha, from organic and self-sufficient agriculture, wine is culture and tradition and there is no luxury without culture”.