João Barroso da Fonte

He attended the Vila Real seminary between 1952 and 1962. In 1966, he enrolled in the Militia Officers Course in Mafra, having been mobilized for the colonial war in Angola in 1965. Returning to Portugal in 1967, he settled in Chaves, where he was a teacher at the Lyceum and editor-in-chief of the weekly newspaper Notícias de Chaves. In 1975, he moved to Guimarães. He enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy in Braga, where he completed his degree (1981) and earned a master's in Philosophy in Portugal and Portuguese Culture with the thesis O Pensamento e a Obra de Alberto Sampaio (1997). He was director of Social Communication in the Northern Zone (Porto delegation) between 1983 and 1985, councilman and substitute president of the Guimarães City Council from 1985 to 1990, and director of the Paço dos Duques de Bragança in Guimarães from 1990 to 1995, the year he retired. Connected to regional information from Guimarães and Vila Real, to references ranging from Chaves to Montalegre, and with particular affection for the Barrosã region, he has made brief forays into the ethnological field – not only in books but also in Trabalhos da Sociedade Portuguesa de Antropologia e Etnologia – or by national authors whom he promoted in A Tribuna and, more frequently, in the magazine Gil Vicente. A journalist since the age of fifteen, he founded and directed the newspapers Além-Marão, G. I. Espaço Novo, Sentinela: Jornal dos Combatentes do Ultramar, A Voz do Combatente, and Voz de Guimarães (1999), directed the magazine Gil Vicente and the newspaper Comércio de Guimarães, and contributed to various magazines and daily and regional newspapers. In 1999, he resumed the publication of Poetas e Trovadores, a monthly arts and letters magazine. He founded and directed several associations and is a member of many others. He created, organized, and promoted floral games and introductory journalism courses, and participated, with presentations, in congresses and writers' meetings. He prefaced about fifty books, mainly poetry, by various authors. He was decorated with the Insignia of the Order of Rio Branco, with the rank of Officer, by the President of the Federal Republic of Brazil (1990), with the Medal of the 1st Centenary of the Abolition of Black Slavery in the Amazon (1991), and with the Military Merit and Commemorative Medals for the Angola Campaigns (1965-1967).