To arrive at the Spiritist Congress of 1900 in Paris, something else had to happen in Portugal in relation to Spiritism - and that happened with the return to the north of the country, more specifically to Braga, of the three Cunha brothers (the reference we have says they were brothers, but certainly not flesh and blood, since their surnames were all different) who, after emigrating to Brazil, returned with the idea of implanting in their country the teaching that had been ‘discovered’ on the Brazilian continent and that had finally reached these plains from France.

In this city, in the 1920s, they bought the Castelos house, on the slopes of Bom-Jesus, and founded the ‘Centro Espírita Luz e Caridade’ (Light and Charity Spiritist Centre) and the spiritism magazine of the same name. In the spiritism magazine ‘Além’, Porto, September/October 1947, Manuel Graça's death is described as follows: ‘Founder of the Spiritist Centre of Braga and of the magazine ‘Luz e Caridade’ together with Joaquim Rocha and Matias Cunha, continuator of the work and leader of the first hour’. In the archives of the Library of Leiria there are references to groups of people meeting for spiritual manifestations, even before Allan Kardec's time. (Information given orally in March 2003 by Isabel Saraiva, responsible for the Spiritist Association of Leiria), and we found a reference to the book ‘RASGANDO AS TREVAS’ in the magazine ‘O Espirita’, October/November 1923, psychographed by the group ‘Fé e Caridade’ of that city and published by the Spiritist Centre of Leiria that year.

António Castanheira de Moura, in an article entitled ‘Memory of the Past - 1926-1951’, published in the «Revista de Metapsicologia» of the F.E.P., writes that ‘Dr. Sousa Couto began his activities in 1898, representing Portugal at the Spiritist Congress in Paris in 1900, and then, on his return to the country, he devoted himself with zeal to the propaganda of Spiritism, studying and disseminating its phenomena.

Abroad, where he was in contact with the scientists of the time and accompanied them when they investigated psychic phenomena in Paris, he forged links with the leading figures of the world spiritism movement of the time, a veritable school that astonished the materialist world, given the indisputable worth of the names at the head of this movement.’ But it was not only the Cunha brothers in Braga, it was not only the lawyer Sousa Couto in Lisbon: thanks to Portugal's proximity to France, to the people who travelled there, to the news that came from there, to the magazines always interested in talking and commenting on subjects that could arouse the interest of their readers, perhaps even and above all because of the spiritual ‘hunger’ that existed in some and in others tired or disillusioned with the religion they knew, in Portugal people began to talk about Spiritism very quickly and very early.

Thus, on January 22nd 1903, the newspaper «O Mundo», under the direction of the writer ‘Ameri’, started a mini-course on Spiritism, in which Allan Kardec, Gabriel Delanne and others were mentioned. Another newspaper, the «Voz do Operário», published articles by Delanne and referred to D. Douglas Home and other spiritists of the time... and all this news seemed destined to open the messages that the medium Fernando de Lacerda, police inspector, began to psychograph, the first of which (known to the public) came from the spirit Camilo Castelo Branco and which soon became public.

Sousa Couto, the aforementioned spiritism lawyer, a respected figure in the society of the time, published a study on the mediumship of the Portuguese Fernando de Lacerda in the magazine ‘Estudos Psíquicos’, which he edited from 1905 to 1909, when he had to close it due to a serious illness. Several newspapers sought out the lawyer to ask him about the new subject, which many wanted to know more about? And little by little, thanks to the names of other well-known personalities who declared themselves to be spiritists, the spiritism doctrine spread throughout the country, as it spread throughout the world?