Aventesma

The project

Aventesma is an eight-episode premium fiction series set in the mountains of Beira Baixa on the eve of the Carnation Revolution. It is a work of high artistic ambition built on a simple conviction: that the Portuguese interior holds stories of real dramatic and emotional weight, and deserves to see them told at the scale of the best contemporary television.

A family, a secret, a country in transformation

The Marques family lives under the weight of silence — a colonial-war secret, a nation on the cusp of profound change. When young Manel encounters the Aventesma, a spectral figure from local folklore said to appear when the land itself is in turmoil, private history and national history begin to collide. The series braids historical drama with the region's living mythology, using the supernatural not as spectacle but as a way of reading a society at a turning point.

Made in the Naturtejo Geopark

Created, written and produced by three-time Emmy Award winner Mitchell Kriegman and Filipe Homem Fonseca, and produced by Rio Bravo Filmes, Aventesma shoots across the UNESCO Naturtejo Global Geopark — a territory spanning seven municipalities of Beira Baixa. The landscape is not a backdrop but a character: its mountains, villages and light shape the look and texture of the series.

Culture as territorial development

Aventesma is conceived with a dual purpose — artistic excellence and the cultural and economic activation of the interior. By binding a high-ambition production to the heritage and identity of Beira Baixa, it aims to draw national and international attention, audiences and visitors to a region too often overlooked, and to show that ambitious storytelling can be a genuine engine of territorial development.