Cidade Universitária Canteen

Designed in 1959 by the architects Manuel Norberto Corrêa and Rafael Miranda, the canteen of the Cidade Universitária — now known as the Cantina Velha (Old Canteen) — opened in 1961, planned for two thousand meals a day.⁶⁷ A year later, it was “one of the central stages” of the 1962 academic crisis.⁷

At a general assembly on 7 May 1962, the students declared “luto académico total” (total academic mourning), with a strike from classes, tests and exams. At the suggestion of Eurico de Figueiredo, a student leader from Medicine, they approved a form of protest never used before: the hunger strike. On 9 May, here in the canteen, 81 students began it, with a signed statement in which they took a “firm and UNYIELDING position”.¹² About 1,500 students, and some lecturers, joined them inside the canteen, which became a bastion of resistance.¹ Among those who supported them was the philosophy student Maria Antónia Fiadeiro, who was arrested by the PIDE for the first time because of it.⁴⁵

In the early hours of 11 May, the police surrounded the canteen and went in. The professors Luís Lindley Cintra and Francisco Pereira de Moura tried to act as mediators. The students were arrested one by one, student association leaders included; many were released the next morning, but some were taken to the prison at Caxias.¹ About 800 students were detained, according to the Public Security Police (PSP), or about 1,200, according to the students’ associations.³

In prison, a group of arrested women students went on refusing food — and “also” refused the sandwiches that the police offered them “insistently, during the afternoon”. The list of strikers identified by the PIDE includes Laura Larcher Graça, Isabel Vila Maior, Isabel Carlos Simões Diniz, Maria da Conceição Santinho, Maria Cristina Pereira, Maria Emília Teles Tavares, Maria Fernanda Guerra and Maria José Barreiro Marques. The hunger strikers were expelled from the university.¹ On the list of those punished, Isabel Vila Maior is the only woman among the 21 students excluded from the University of Lisbon for 30 months.⁹

Today it is the University of Lisbon’s Cantina Velha, and the building also houses the university’s Social Action Services.⁸ The dining hall, with its vaulted ceiling, holds works by Domingos Soares Branco, Jorge Vieira, Rolando Sá Nogueira, Teresa Sousa and Vasco da Conceição.⁶