Lisbon and Île-de-France cooperate on Innovation, Mobility and Culture

The protocol, signed by the Mayor and the Lisbon Metropolitan Council, Carlos Moedas, and Valérie Pécresse, president of the Île-de-France region - visiting Lisbon, reaffirms the strategic partnership between the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (AML) and the Île-de-France region, the most populated in France, with 12.3 million inhabitants, whose Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is greater than Portugal's GDP.

At the reception in Lisbon's Paços do Concelho, Carlos Moedas highlighted the strong presence of the Portuguese community in France and the French community in Lisbon, stressing that this human connection reinforces the scope of the protocol and the proximity between the two territories.

Ahead of a visit to the Unicorn Factory - inspired by Station F in Paris, "the largest startup campus in the world - Carlos Moedas pointed out that "this is a protocol that affects many issues, the issue that is at the heart of what we, in the metropolis of Lisbon, in our region, want to do: innovation, innovation as the engine of employment".

The ties that unite the two regions "are really very strong", said Valérie Pécresse: "We have around 700,000 inhabitants of Île-de-France who speak Portuguese, who are Portuguese or descendants of Portuguese (...). We're a large Lusophone region, and it's only natural that we should be the first partners of Portugal's capital," she said.

"We want to bring our incubators together," added the president of the French region. "Many young people from the Paris region now come to Lisbon to telework, and we also have many young Portuguese who consider their first market to be France. So it's important to get them to work together, and Europe will help us with that, because with Carlos Moedas we want to participate in more European programs, get more European funds and develop interregional partnerships."