Free Steps between Walls and Hills is a 22 km walk from the center of Guimarães to Citânia de Briteiros.
This walk, promoted by AVE – Associação Vimaranense para a Ecologia, in partnership with The Walking Body, proposes itself as a practice of sensitive inscription in the territory, where the movement of the body is not merely displacement, but a way of thinking, perceiving, and generating relation. Walking becomes here a locative gesture: an act through which space ceases to be a backdrop and asserts itself as a relational field, woven through the interaction between body, environment, memory, and imagination.The long duration of this route plays a decisive role. It is in the prolongation of effort, in the rhythm of breathing, and in the alternation between silence and conversation that the group transforms into a collective body, attuning speeds, pauses, and levels of attention. The tempo is not imposed — it emerges from mutual listening, from the terrain, the climate, and the texture of the ground. Walking at length becomes an exercise in synchronization between interior and exterior, between physiological time and the time of the landscape.Between Guimarães and the Citânia de Briteiros, the route crosses walls and hills that are both geographical and symbolic. Each boundary crossed becomes a perceptual threshold; each elevation, a device for reading. The territory presents itself as a living archive where natural and cultural processes coexist, opening to plural interpretations and to narratives in constant reformulation.

In this walk, freedom does not present itself as an abstract or guaranteed condition, but as a situated experience emerging from co-presence, shared attention, and the possibility of walking together. The walk thus affirms itself as an ecological and ethical practice: a way of inhabiting space that requires care, reciprocity, and responsibility toward the multiple forms of life that constitute it.

The walk is supported by: Sociedade Martins Sarmento