Portugal’s Prime Minister, Pedro Passos Coelho, is to arrive in Sri Lanka on Sunday for a one-day official visit during which he will drop in on Portuguese aid projects and hold bilateral talks with high-ranking officials.

This will be the first ever visit by a prime minister of Portugal to Sri Lanka. He will visit Sri Lanka before travelling on to the summit of the Community of Portuguese-Language Countries (CPLP) that is scheduled for July 23 in Dili.

Passos Coelho is expected to arrive in Colombo on July 20 and leave the following day for East Timor, where he is to join Portugal’s president, Aníbal Cavaco Silva, for what will be the 10th CPLP summit.

In Sri Lanka, he is expected to meet President Mahinda Rajapaksa and prime minister D.M. Jayaratne and visit two projects supported by Assistência Médica Internacional (AMI), a medical aid agency, in the company of its president, Fernando Nobre.

The projects are the Colombo-based Centre for Society and Religion, which according to AMI promotes human rights and solutions to local problems by drawing on the values of the country’s main religions - Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam - and the Sri Lanka Portuguese Burgher Foundation in Batticaloa, an area badly affected by the tsunami of 2004 whose population includes some 5,000 descendants of Portuguese settlers from the 16th and 17th centuries.

The visit is also to see the signing of a memorandum of understanding between Portugal’s foreign trade and investment agency, AICEP, and its Sri Lankan counterpart.