On your left stands one of Porto’s great acts of self-invention: the University of Porto, founded on the twenty-second of March, nineteen eleven, when the new republic chose learning as a civic monument in its own right. It carried older schools into a more secular, modern future, turning long habits of study into something unmistakably public and ambitious.
That matters here in Porto, a city that keeps changing its purpose without quite losing its memory. The university did not appear from nowhere. It gathered the strength of earlier institutions: the old Nautical Academy from the eighteenth century, the Drawing and Sketching Academy, and above all the nineteenth-century Polytechnic Academy and Medical-Surgical Academy. In other words, the city took its older training in navigation, trade, science, art and medicine, and gave it a new name, a new structure, and a new confidence.
If you glance at the image on your screen, you can see the city-centre setting that still gives the university its symbolic heart, near the Rectorate and the familiar urban theatre around it. The neoclassical building here marks the university’s birthplace. It looks composed, even self-assured. But its history is not calm.
The first rector, Gomes Teixeira, gave the institution both prestige and a story people still love to repeat. As a boy, his family could not decide whether he should enter the seminary or go to university. So, according to local legend, they tossed a coin. Theology lost; mathematics won. Porto gained one of its great scientists, and the newborn university gained a guiding mind just when it needed one. There is something wonderfully Porto about that: a serious future decided by chance, then redeemed by discipline.
And then there is Abel Salazar, physician, painter, philosopher, and one of the university’s moral giants. In nineteen thirty-five, the dictatorship expelled him from his professorship for his so-called dangerous influence on the young. That meant his democratic ideals frightened the regime more than any lecture on anatomy. Salazar answered with a line still quoted across Portugal: a doctor who only knows medicine does not even know medicine. He believed science should remain human, curious, and ethically awake. If you look at the other image, you’ll see the institute that now carries his name.
This university has known damage as well as hope. In April nineteen seventy-four, just days before the Carnation Revolution, fire tore through the Rectory. A passing taxi driver spotted the blaze and raised the alarm. The flames destroyed the Senate Hall and part of the historical archive, yet the building survived, and Porto restored it. That restoration feels fitting. Around this city, stone is not the only thing rebuilt; institutions are too.
Today, the university stretches far beyond this centre, with thousands of students and major research centres, and it remains one of Portugal’s leading universities with an international reputation. Its festivals spill into the streets as well. During Queima das Fitas, students flood downtown in ribbons, music, top hats and canes, turning scholarship into spectacle.
In a moment, we’ll step toward João Chagas Garden, where trees, memorials and planned urban space soften the edge between public life and private memory. If you plan to return, the university’s central facilities generally open from nine in the morning to six in the evening on weekdays, with shorter hours on Saturday and closure on Sunday.
