At this event we'll get to know the world of Freemasonry "inside out" through a guided tour of the Portuguese Masonic Museum.

Portuguese Masonic Museum:

Do you know what the Masons' meeting rooms look like? What are the pillars in the centre for? The function of the mosaics on the floor? If you don't know, go to the Lusitanian Grand Orient. Portuguese freemasonry, seen by the average citizen as an organisation full of formalism, strange rituals and secrecy, has its own Portuguese Masonic Museum, set up at its headquarters in Lisbon.

The headquarters are at the Grande Oriente Lusitano, the second oldest "obedience" (or structure of Masonic lodges) in Europe, which celebrated its 200th anniversary in 2002. Closed since December 2004, the museum has reopened with a different presentation: "Before it was much more inward-looking and now it's more outward-looking". The focus now, after five months of remodelling and restructuring the permanent exhibition, is on the general public. Until last year, visits were limited to students, historians and others who had a historical interest in the exhibits, and it was necessary to book in advance - in 2004 there were a thousand visitors.

In the two new exhibition rooms, there is a permanent exhibition centre and a space for temporary exhibitions. The first room exhibits individual pieces that Masons used in their Masonic rituals and objects used by lodges between the 18th and 20th centuries, such as the drawing of the organisation of the Masons' meeting at which the establishment of the Republic was discussed, on loan from the Mário Soares Foundation.

The temporary exhibition, the first in the "new" museum, is called António Augusto Louro - Maçon há Cem Anos, and presents this Freemason and the activity of Freemasonry on the south bank of the Tagus between 1904 and 1916, and in the Alcanena and Torres Novas area between 1908 and the 1920s. The opening panel has a Masonic principle: "You don't have to be a Freemason to be useful to humanity, but every Freemason is useful to humanity." Until 1910, the greatest "usefulness" of freemasonry was, says António Lopes, teaching in primary schools. Then, he explains, "it moved on to the rights and duties of citizenship, an interest that continues to this day".