Son of Joaquim Cândido de Almeida, a merchant, and Maria Justina Lopes de Almeida, Manuel Lopes de Almeida completed his secondary education at the Santarém Secondary School in order to enrol at the Medical School of the University of Coimbra. He then transferred to the School of Arts and Humanities, given his interest in History, graduating in Historical and Geographical Sciences in 1929 and obtaining a PhD in Historical Sciences in 1940 from the same University, with a highly commended dissertation entitled Estudos de história da Restauração. I - Notícias da Aclamação e de Outros Sucessos [Studies in the history of the Restoration. I - News of the Acclamation and Other Successes] . Between 1927 and 1929 , he was a lecturer in Portuguese at the University of Hamburg. In 1930 , he joined the teaching staff of the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra, being promoted to Full Professor in 1942 and retiring in 1970. His teaching activity encompassed various subjects, including Medieval History, Modern and Contemporary History, History of Portuguese Discoveries and Colonisation, General History of Civilisation, Archival Science, and the seminar on Modern Portuguese History.

Director of the General Library of the University of Coimbra between 1945 and 1970, he was responsible for the opening of the new building, the renewal of its staff and the incorporation of the libraries of the Viscount of Trindade, Pedro de Moura e Sá, Belisário Pimenta , and Octaviano de Sá. During his leadership , he carried out significant editorial work, whose structure still shapes the current publication plan.

Having António de Vasconcelos, Gonçalves Cerejeira , and Paulo Merêa as his teachers, as well as Joaquim de Carvalho, Mendes dos Remédios, Carolina Michaelis and Eugénio de Castro, who provided him with the historical methods of heuristics and hermeneutics, as well as philological and literary knowledge, his solid training was fundamental in historical research. He was the secretary and collaborator of Biblos , journal of the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra; with the collaboration of Jorge Peixoto, he founded Arquivo de Bibliografia Portuguesa [ Portuguese Bibliography Archive] , essential for the history of arts and crafts, and participated in Monumenta Henricina , with Father António Joaquim Dias Dinis and Idalino Ferreira da Costa Brochado. For the publisher Livraria Lello, he wrote several introductions to the works of some of the national classics in the collection Tesouros da Literatura e da História , and his contribution to the História de Portugal [History of Portugal] directed by Damião Peres is noteworthy.

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