Liceu Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho (successor to the Liceu Maria Pia, the first girls’ secondary school)

The writer and journalist Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho, whose name the school bears today, argued from the end of the 19th century for the creation of a secondary school for girls; in 1885 she got King Luís to sign a decree authorising it.⁵ The school was established by royal decree in 1906, under the name Liceu Maria Pia — the country’s first girls’ liceu.¹ Its headmistress, from its founding to November 1912, was Domitila de Carvalho, the first woman to attend the University of Coimbra and the first Portuguese woman to teach mathematics.³² The school offered only the General Course: girls who wanted the Complementary Course had to enrol in the boys’ liceus. On 24 December 1917, Sidónio Pais raised it to a central liceu, under the name Liceu de Almeida Garrett; later it took the name of Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho.³

From 1933, the school occupied this building, the first purpose-built for a girls’ liceu, to a design by Miguel Ventura Terra with alterations by António do Couto de Abreu.¹ The premises only became permanent in the 1933–1934 school year.⁵ The ministerial order that listed the building as a Monument of Public Interest in October 2020 speaks of “a simple and functional construction model”, clearly influenced by French lycées, and of “an exemplary case of girls’ school buildings”.¹

From 1928 to 1946, the headmistress was the mathematics teacher Maria Guardiola. In the elections of 16 December 1934, she and Domitila de Carvalho entered the National Assembly with the lawyer Maria Cândida Parreira: they were the first three Portuguese women deputies.² Guardiola was on the regime’s side: she held leading posts in the Mothers’ Work for National Education (Obra das Mães pela Educação Nacional) and in the Women’s Portuguese Youth (Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina), of which she was national commissioner.²⁴