Calçada Ribeiro Santos

José António Leitão Ribeiro Santos was born on 19 March 1946 and lived on this street, near Largo de Santos; his home was often used as a meeting place by students.¹

On 14 October 1972, two days after he was killed by the DGS at the ISCEF, thousands of people gathered at the door of the building from which the cortege was to leave. The students insisted on carrying the coffin on their shoulders, there were shouts of “murderers” and “long live freedom”, and the police charged during the procession and at the Ajuda Cemetery. Toponímia de Lisboa, the City Council’s street-names service, counts some five thousand people and twenty arrests.¹² “The funeral was a demonstration of grief and fury that must have troubled the Government more than anything else that year”, wrote Teresa Pizarro Beleza in 1992.²

The first street-naming edict after 25 April, on 30 December 1974, renamed Calçada de Santos as Calçada Ribeiro Santos, with the inscription “Anti-Fascist Activist/1946 – 1972”. In 2012, forty years after the murder, a plaque was put up on the house: “Here was born and lived José Ribeiro Santos, 1946-1972. Student, leader of the Students’ Association of the Faculty of Law and resister against the Dictatorship, who lost his life for the cause of Freedom.”¹³