Professor, ethnographer, and linguist, Estanco Louro was born into a large and humble agricultural family in the foothills of the Algarve, at São Brás de Alportel, at the time a rural parish in the Faro area. In 1904 he concluded his primary studies with distinction. On account of his lively intelligence, and on the advice of his teacher, the family decided that he, alone of all their children, should continue his education at Faro Seminary (1905–10). However, in view of his manifest lack of any ecclesiastical vocation, he moved to the Liceu Nacional de Faro, where he completed his secondary education in the school year 1910–11.

In both Faro and São Brás de Alportel the young Estanco Louro engaged actively in the Republican ideals that were to mark indelibly his ethical and civic attitudes throughout his life. In 1912 he was admitted to the Faculty of Letters, in Lisbon, to the course in Romance Philology. Teaching in the Faculty at that time were José Leite de Vasconcelos and José Maria Rodrigues, whose classes he attended, as well as the philologist José Joaquim Nunes and the Arabist, David Lopes, who had published in the fields of linguistics, onomastics, toponymy and ethnography in Portugal. These professors influenced his decision to follow research in the linguistic history and ethnography of the Algarve. By the beginning of the century both disciplines were developing rapidly, creating wide debate and the formation of schools of thought. In that same year, at the start of his university education, he wrote an article, Pronunciação dos ditongos no sub-dialecto do sotavento montanhoso algarvio [Pronunciation of diphthongs in the leeward mountainous Algarve] (1913), which was published by the newspaper Ecos do Sul, in São Brás do Alportel, following the methods then being applied to linguistic studies, particularly by Leite de Vasconcelos. At the same time he started collecting data for a study he intended to write on speech in Alportel. In the meantime he was admitted to the Faculty of Social and Legal Studies (1914). In addition to his two courses, he also attended lectures in a wide variety of subjects, such as Aesthetics and History of Art, Spanish and Italian Literature, Modern and Contemporary History, History of Medieval Philosophy, Geography of Portugal and the Colonies, thus displaying the wide variety of interests in the humanities that he always cultivated. He also started writing for Seara Nova.

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