Cidade Universitária de Lisboa (University Stadium and faculties)

On the morning of 24 March 1962, after Salazar’s Government banned the Students’ Day celebrations, the students gathered here, in the Cidade Universitária. The police beat and arrested students and occupied university buildings and canteens;¹ the riot police charged them several times at the University Stadium and in Campo Grande.² The 1962 academic crisis had begun.

On 26 March, the students’ associations of Lisbon and Coimbra declared “luto académico” (academic mourning) — a strike from classes, a right banned by the dictatorship. The open-air general assemblies, in front of the faculties of Medicine and Letters and the Rectorate, and in the University Stadium, were something new in a gagged society.² At one of them, in the University Stadium, the medical student Isabel do Carmo spoke, the first woman to take the floor at a general assembly of the crisis. The PIDE noted that she foresaw a “Free Nation” and proposed that flowers be offered to the police, “the most beautiful weapons created in Portugal”.³

On 9 May, at the suggestion of Eurico Figueiredo, president of the Pro-Association Committee of the Medical Students, the students gathered in the Cidade Universitária canteen went on hunger strike; days later, the riot police removed them by force and made hundreds of arrests.⁵ Maria Antónia Fiadeiro, a philosophy student at the Faculty of Letters, was arrested by the PIDE for the first time for supporting the strikers.⁷ On the morning of 4 June, the riot police charged at the entrance to the Faculty of Medicine, and Professor Lindley Cintra, a philologist at the Faculty of Letters who supported the students and was trying to talk to the police, was assaulted and treated in hospital. The expulsions followed: Eurico Figueiredo, Mário Sottomayor Cardia and Isabel Vila Maior were among the 21 students excluded from the University of Lisbon for thirty months.⁴ On 14 November, the riot police occupied the Cidade Universitária again.²

The Cidade Universitária remained a place of struggle. In 1964, Diana Andringa entered the Faculty of Medicine and, that year, went to her first demonstration, demanding the release of Saldanha Sanches.⁸ At the Faculty of Letters, Helena Neves helped to organise strikes and demonstrations, and at one of them a PIDE agent struck her with the butt of his gun.⁹ In February 1972, Maria José Morgado was suspended from the Faculty of Law “for disturbances”, together with José António Ribeiro Santos and José Galamba de Oliveira.¹⁰

Since 1987, 24 March has been marked as National Students’ Day, in tribute to the students who resisted.¹