Manuel Viegas Guerreiro was an important Portuguese ethnologist and a follower of the work of Leite de Vasconcelos as well as one of his essential collaborators. The son of Manuel Joaquim Guerreiro and Inácia Gertrude da Conceição, he was born into a rural family and maintained a close relationship throughout his life with his country origins, that were structural in his work.

At the age of three he moved with his parents to Vila Nova de Portimão, where he completed primary school. In 1922 he moved to the city of Faro, where he attended secondary school. The geographical distance, however, did not create an obstacle to maintaining a close relationship with his family. He made multiple visits to Portimão and attended regular family reunions in Querença, where the extended family gathered annually.

These reunions also fed Viegas Guerreiro's interest in folk traditions and rural structures, which resulted, in 1927, in the collection and writing of a study on 'the poems of Mr. Francisco Martins Farias', and later in 1930, in his first publication – an essay on ‘O Homem através dos Tempos’ (Man Through the Ages), in the Comércio de Portimão newspaper, in which his interest in the issues of anthropology and ethnology was already evident.

In 1931 he completed secondary education with a final grade of 17 points, and the next year he left for Lisbon to continue his studies. Between 1932 and 1936 he studied Classical Philology in the Faculty of Arts and Literature at the University of Lisbon, completing his degree at age 25 with a dissertation on ‘A Adivinhação na primitiva epopeia grega e na Eneida. Subsídios‘ (Divination in the Early Greek Epic and Aeneid. Data), with a final score of 16 points. In the 1936-1937 academic year he completed his first year of teaching practice at the Liceu Normal Pedro Nunes secondary school.

Studying in Lisbon allowed him to come into contact with a network of researchers and scholars who would represent a significant influence on his future work. A colleague of Orlando Ribeiro (1911-1997), the two joined the circles led by Rodrigues Lapa (1897-1989), Agostinho da Silva (1906-1994), Alberto Araújo (1909-1955) and Leite de Vasconcelos (1858 -1941), who would become Guerreiro's mentor.

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