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The project MigRural benefits from Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement n. 794030. I write it first, so it is written in the "cloud", in the virtual eternal life of our data.I took the decision of writing a blog, to document this two-year long research. It seems long. But it will probably be too quick! Nonetheless, even if time flies, I hope to publish regularly thoughts, revealing the on-going intellectual and scientific process of an individual research of the sort. This can include post-conference posts, to "trace" the exchanges and learnings, as well as abstracts of publications; reviews of books, key articles, news articles and audiovisual sources I read and watch along the years; and fieldwork related posts, such as photo galleries, field diary's extracts and so forth.The MigRural project addresses one of the mobility patterns affecting rural regions of Portugal: the return of Portuguese immigrants who reside or resided in France (one of the largest recipient of the Portuguese immigration until recently), to rural regions of the country.The “semi-peripheral” position of Portugal, away from the European core, in-between different economic and migration systems (the Western European, Mediterranean and Lusophone systems), enables a ‘de-centred’ inquiry, which can reveal the more fragmented rescaling of power occurring in those rural regions. Within this semi-peripheral positioning, Portuguese rural areas could be doubly sanctioned as peripheral islands. Nevertheless, with this assumption in mind, new mobilities to these regions, such as return mobilities or immigration to villages and towns, as well as new economic initiatives, such as tourism, benefiting from enhanced communication and a cost differential, seem to challenge (at least partially) the marginalisation of Portuguese rural villages and towns.The investigation will take place in the northern region of Portugal, close to the Spanish border. A first objective consists in understanding the extent and nature of return mobilities to those areas, which at the same time, produce and are the results of a revitalisation of decayed areas. Secondly, through this ethnography and fieldwork-driven project, I would like to extend the understanding of return mobilities, not only to first generation resettlement, but to ancestral and recreational return. With this framework, the complexities and dynamics of mobilities are made more acute. A third objective aims at deciphering ‘acts of homing’: they are foreseen as key practices to understanding the agency of those returnees in shaping the places they visit or inhabit, and participating in the production of places. Here, the ethnography will combine in-depth encounters with visual methods, in order to capture the traces, materialities, symbols and practices of place production. 