Estanco Louro considered toponymy a major element of linguistic geography. He claimed that his work researching the toponymy of the Algarve had revealed that “the pre-Roman linguistic heritage is much larger than previously thought, and contrary to what was previously thought, that it is much less than the heritage by blood and spirit that the Arabs have left to us in place names” (p. 11). And he concluded that “The two facts are however sufficient to establish the principle that toponymic language, that is, the language of the book of the earth, is always the last to die. And furthermore, it is the most perennial of the vestiges of a people” (p. 14). According to the introduction to the published version of Toponímia algarvia, he collected over the space of eight years around 8000 place names, which he systematized in thirteen thematic sections, and added a toponymic index that he believed would become a valuable contribution to the rich lexical treasury of the Portuguese language, since “the apparatus of vocabulary formation presents here, alongside the abundance of suffixation, curious semantic modalities unknown to grammarians” (p. 11).

In his Etnografia algarvia, dated 1949, he calls attention to the need to regard this work as a complement and continuation of O livro de Alportel and of the works he says he has ready to go to press, Toponímia algarvia and Geografia linguística. The manuscript was transcribed by the Biblioteca Municipal de São Brás de Alportel, and its 377 pages reveal an extremely detailed study of the organization of economic and social life, based on statistical data and contextualized by an introduction to the physical geography of the Algarve region. The fact that, unlike O livro de Alportel, the book does not offer a chapter on cultural traditions and oral literature leads some ethnographers to underestimate its contribution in the ethnographic field..

The systematic and detailed research and collection of place names and expressions in popular Algarve speech, of the resources and modes of organization of the population’s economic and social life, along with discussion of the methods he applied and the chosen criteria, became inaccessible to the following generation. Critical and innovative towards his teacher and friend, Leite de Vasconcelos, it would however be Paiva Boléo who would publish a study of dialects based on the method of linguistic geography that he had fought for. The same would happen with his ethnographic studies. Heir to the knowledge gathered by Estácio Veiga and Athaíde de Oliveira, the innovative and daring method he applied to O livro do Alportel and the comparative information he records in Etnografia algarvia would not be mentioned or discussed by the generation of Manuel Viegas Guerreiro or Aliete Galhoz, to mention only researchers from the Algarve.

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