Orlando Ribeiro

Orlando Ribeiro (1911–1997) was a Portuguese geographer and historian.

Biography

Orlando Ribeiro was born in Lisbon, Portugal.

Ribeiro devoted his life to the teaching and research of geography and is often labelled as one of the main reformists of this science in Portugal. He graduated in Geography and History in 1932, and completed his doctorate at the University of Lisbon in 1935. Between 1937 and 1940 (during World War II), he lived in Paris and worked at the Sorbonne University, alongside March Bloch, Emmanuel de Martonne and A. Demangeon. In 1940 he taught at the University of Coimbra, although he soon settled in his natal city of Lisbon. In 1943 he founded the Centro de Estudos Geográficos (Centre for Geographical Studies). Ribeiro also lived in Goa temporarily, where he worked as a geographer for the Portuguese government.

Among his publications, one book stands out: Portugal, o Mediterrâneo e o Atlântico (1945). This is one of the cornerstones in his career, as he develops a detailed study on Portugal's "dual nature", or in other words, "a country which is Atlantic by location but mostly Mediterranean in culture". Yet, this book had a wide impact, since Ribeiro deepens the concepts of Atlantic Europe and Mediterranean Europe, linking central and southern Portugal to the Mediterranean culture and northern Portugal (together with Galicia) to a pan-Atlantic European culture. In fact, Ribeiro is one of the first geographers formulating the idea of Atlantic Europe as a geographical and cultural unit (it had been partially advanced by Otero Pedrayo), an idea which would be further developed by authors such as P. Flatrès, Emyr Estyn Evans, A. Bouhier, Meynier, J. García Fernández, Patrick O'Flanagan, Barry Cunliffe, Carlos Ferrás Sexto and Xoán Paredes.

In 1966, the Centro de Estudos Geográficos began to publish the geography journal Finisterra, which soon would become the main reference of geographical science in Portugal, to the present day.

Ribeiro was also an accomplished photographer, and he would often take the pictures himself for his works.

He died in Lisbon in 1997.

Partial bibliography

External links

See also

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