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University of Porto

Logo: U.Porto, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons³

Public research university in Porto, Portugal

Last updated Oct 21, 2026.

Overview

1911Founded¹

HeadquartersRectory of the University of Oporto¹
Websitewww.up.pt

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The University of Porto (Portuguese: Universidade do Porto, U.Porto) is a public research university in Porto, Portugal, and one of the country's leading institutions of higher education and scientific research. It was created by decree of the provisional government of the First Portuguese Republic on 22 March 1911, at the same time as the University of Lisbon, on the basis of schools founded in the city from 1762 onwards, which had given rise to the Polytechnic Academy (1837) and the Medical-Surgical School (1836). Since 2009 it has been a public foundation governed by private law. It comprises fifteen constituent units – thirteen faculties, the Abel Salazar Institute of Biomedical Sciences and the Nursing School – and, excluding the Nursing School, had 35,815 students in 2024/25, of whom 4,536 were doctoral candidates; international students, of 119 nationalities, made up 14% of the total.²

Corporate structure

University of Porto sits at the top of its group. 16 entities, 1 country on record. Switch between the flow chart and the network, and select any entity to see its details.

University of Porto Rectory of the University of Oporto
- Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto Subsidiary
- Escola Médico-Cirúrgica do Porto Subsidiary · Porto, Portugal
- Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto Subsidiary · Lordelo do Ouro e Massarelos, Portugal
- Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto Subsidiary · Bonfim, Portugal
- Faculty of Law of the University of Porto Subsidiary · Cedofeita, Santo Ildefonso, Sé, Miragaia, São Nicolau e Vitória, Portugal
- Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto Subsidiary · Paranhos, Portugal
- Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Porto Subsidiary · Cedofeita, Santo Ildefonso, Sé, Miragaia, São Nicolau e Vitória, Portugal
- Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences of the University of Porto Subsidiary · Portugal
- Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto Subsidiary · Lordelo do Ouro e Massarelos, Portugal
- Faculty of Sports of University of Porto Subsidiary · Paranhos, Portugal
- Institute of Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Mangement Subsidiary · Paranhos, Portugal
- Instituto de Ciências Biomédicas Abel Salazar Subsidiary · Porto, Portugal
- Museum of Natural History and Science of the University of Porto Subsidiary · Porto, Portugal
- Porto School of Architecture Subsidiary · Lordelo do Ouro e Massarelos, Portugal
- School of Economics and Management of the University of Porto Subsidiary · Paranhos, Portugal

Built from subsidiaries, stakes and holdings from Wikidata (CC0); major holders from Schedules 13D and 13G. Each entity in the chart links to its source.

The story

Origins (1762–1911)

The university descends from schools created in Porto from the 18th century onwards, such as the Nautical Class (Aula de Náutica), established by King Joseph I in 1762, and the Drawing Class (Aula de Debuxo e Desenho), created by Queen Maria I in 1779. It was founded mainly on two institutions created under the reforms of Passos Manuel: the Polytechnic Academy (1837), successor to the Royal Academy of the Navy and Commerce (1803), which trained engineers, naval officers, pilots, merchants, farmers, factory managers and artists; and the Medical-Surgical School (1836), successor to the Royal School of Surgery (1825) and attached to the Santo António Hospital.

From 1911 to 1974

Created by decree on 22 March 1911, together with the University of Lisbon, the University of Porto ended the University of Coimbra's monopoly on university education in Portugal. It initially consisted of the Faculty of Sciences, which absorbed the engineering chairs of the Polytechnic Academy, and the Faculty of Medicine, with an attached School of Pharmacy; its first rector was the mathematician Francisco Gomes Teixeira. The Technical Faculty (1915), later the Faculty of Engineering, the Faculty of Letters (1919), the Faculty of Pharmacy (1921) and the Faculty of Economics (1953) followed. The first Faculty of Letters, where Leonardo Coimbra taught and whose students included Agostinho da Silva, Delfim Santos and Álvaro Ribeiro, was abolished in 1928 and re-established in 1961. Under the military dictatorship and the Estado Novo, the university lost teachers in the waves of dismissals of 1935 and 1947, among them Abel Salazar and Ruy Luís Gomes; after the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974, Ruy Luís Gomes returned to the university as its rector.

Since 1974

After 1974 the university expanded into all the major fields of knowledge. Between 1975 and 1996 the Abel Salazar Institute of Biomedical Sciences and the faculties of Sport, Architecture, Psychology and Education Sciences, Dental Medicine, Fine Arts, Law, and Nutrition and Food Sciences were added to the six existing faculties. From the 1990s onwards the faculties gradually moved into new buildings on the Asprela and Campo Alegre campuses. In 2009 the university became a public higher education institution with the status of a foundation; in its centenary year, 2011, it was made an Honorary Member of the Order of Saint James of the Sword; and in 2024 it began to incorporate the Porto Nursing School, a process completed in December 2025.

Symbols

The university's motto, Virtus unita fortius agit, had been that of the Polytechnic Academy. Its traditional emblem is the figure of Minerva, the Roman goddess of handicrafts, the professions, the arts and, later, war, who was commonly identified with the Greek Athena and formed the Capitoline Triad with Jupiter and Juno. The university's identity manual presents Minerva as its principal image, standing for lofty thought, letters, music, the arts, wisdom and intelligence, and reserves it for formal uses such as the sealing of documents, diplomas of merit and the watermark of official paper.

On the seal, the figure is seated beneath a Gothic canopy, holding a sceptre in her right hand and an open book in her left; at her feet a quartered shield combines the arms of Portugal and the old arms of the city of Porto, the Virgin and Child between two towers. A "sphragistic emblem" for the university was approved in 1925. The medal designed by the sculptor João da Silva for the centenaries of 1937 became the university's symbol in 1940 and has been its doctoral medal since 1994. In January 2003 the university Senate approved the doctoral dress, the motto replaced the legend Portucalensis Universitas around the medal, and old gold replaced pink as the university's colour. The visual identity introduced in March 2004 added the "U.Porto" logotype and kept a retouched Minerva, accompanied by the motto and the dates 1762, when public instruction began in Porto, and 1911.

University Day, instituted in 1999, is celebrated on 22 March, the anniversary of the university's foundation.

From Wikipedia’s article on University of Porto, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.⁴

Leadership

Who has led University of Porto, and when. Pick a name to see everywhere that person has worked.

Board members and other officers (1)

Board memberCarlos Sá Jan 1, 2001 to now¹

Products and brands

Other locations

Elsewhere in Porto are the Augusto Nobre Marine Zoology Station, in Foz do Douro, and the Marques da Silva Foundation, in the home and studio of the architect José Marques da Silva. In Vila Nova de Gaia are the Geophysical Institute and the Astronomical Observatory; in Matosinhos, the Interdisciplinary Centre of Marine and Environmental Research (CIIMAR), in the Port of Leixões Cruise Terminal, the Porto Business School and the Abel Salazar House-Museum; and in Vairão (Vila do Conde), the Research Centre in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources (CIBIO), the BIOPOLIS association and veterinary facilities of the ICBAS.

Research

Organisation and output

Research is organised in 45 research and development units, 11 associated research institutes, 16 associate laboratories and 21 collaborative laboratories, among other structures. In the 2023/24 evaluation by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), 93% of the units in the university's ecosystem were rated "Excellent" or "Very Good". Among the associated institutes, the i3S – Institute for Research and Innovation in Health, opened in 2016, was described at the time by the Lusa News Agency as the largest Portuguese research institute in the health sciences; its building also houses the Institute for Molecular and Cell Biology (IBMC) and the National Institute of Biomedical Engineering (INEB).

Between 2020 and 2024 the university's researchers published about 31,000 documents indexed in the Web of Science, 24% of the citable Portuguese documents in that database; 12% of them were among the 10% most cited and 58% resulted from international collaboration. By May 2026, according to the university, researchers of the university and of its associated institutes had obtained 26 grants from the European Research Council, many of them hosted by legally distinct entities such as the i3S, CIIMAR or INEGI. The 2025 update of the list "World's Top 2% Scientists", compiled by researchers at Stanford University and published by Elsevier, included 205 of the university's teachers and researchers, more than a fifth of the Portuguese scientists listed. The university works closely with Porto's two central hospitals: Santo António, where the ICBAS conducts its clinical teaching, and São João, where the Faculty of Medicine is based.

Scientific contributions

At the Polytechnic Academy, Francisco Gomes Teixeira wrote the Tratado de las curvas especiales notables (Treatise on Remarkable Special Curves), a catalogue of more than a hundred plane and space curves, awarded a prize by the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences of Madrid and published in 1905, with an enlarged French edition between 1908 and 1915. At the Faculty of Medicine, Abel Salazar, professor of histology, developed a tannin–iron staining method that brought him international recognition.

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Research on familial amyloid polyneuropathy entered the university with the ICBAS. The disease had been described in 1952 by Corino de Andrade, from patients seen at the Santo António General Hospital; he then held no post at the university, which made him a full professor only in 1976, after he had taken part in founding the ICBAS. In 1984 Maria João Saraiva characterised, in the Portuguese form of the disease, the substitution of valine by methionine at position 30 of transthyretin, in a University of Porto doctorate carried out mostly at Columbia University; her group later developed mouse models in which a combination of doxycycline and tauroursodeoxycholic acid reduced transthyretin deposits, a combination then tested in patients in a phase II study in Pavia. At the Institute of Molecular Pathology and Immunology (Ipatimup), now part of the i3S, research on hereditary diffuse gastric cancer, associated with mutations in the E-cadherin gene (CDH1), showed in 2009 that large deletions of the gene occur in about 4% of affected families, and the institute's researchers co-authored the 2020 international clinical guidelines; in 2013 the institute described the frequency of mutations in the promoter of the TERT gene in several cancers, including thyroid cancer.

In other fields, teams at CIBIO led by Miguel Carneiro showed, with Uppsala University and the Broad Institute, that the domestication of the rabbit resulted mainly from changes in the frequency of variants in many genes (2014), and identified the gene CYP2J19, which allows birds to turn yellow carotenoids into red ones, a result obtained at the same time at the University of Cambridge (2016). At the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences, a team led by João Faria announced in 2022, using the ESPRESSO spectrograph on the Very Large Telescope, the detection of Proxima Centauri d, a candidate planet of the star closest to the Sun, at the time the lightest planet measured by the radial-velocity method. The Underwater Systems and Technology Laboratory of the Faculty of Engineering developed light autonomous underwater vehicles, marketed since 2008 by the spin-off OceanScan-MST, and organises with the Portuguese Navy the annual REP(MUS) exercise for unmanned systems. In artificial intelligence, the simulated robot football team FC Portugal, a joint project of the universities of Porto and Aveiro, won the RoboCup simulation league world championship in 2000.

Innovation

At the end of 2025 the university had 742 active patent processes, 427 of them international, and counted 3,567 jobs created by the start-ups and spin-off companies linked to it. In 2024 it was the Portuguese university that filed the most applications with the European Patent Office, and in 2023 a ranking by Startup Portugal, based on Dealroom data, placed it first among Portuguese universities, with 275 start-up founders among its former students. Its science and technology park, UPTEC, has four centres, two at Asprela, one in the city centre and one in Leça da Palmeira; according to an impact study cited by the business news site ECO, it had a total impact of €324 million on Portugal's gross domestic product. Companies that emerged from the university include Veniam, whose Wi-Fi network on Porto's buses and taxis was described by the MIT Technology Review in 2014.