This festive occasion was, however, met by a period of adversity when the funding for the Congress was exhausted. In the years to follow, it was only possible to obtain funding occasionally, to undertake research in the distant, barely known overseas territories. In 1947, Orlando Ribeiro travelled to and described Portuguese Guinea, on the pretext of a soon to be held Pan-African Congress and, in 1951-1952, he completed the monograph Ilha do Fogo [Fogo Island], based on the brutal volcanic eruption that had struck the island. It was by evoking hostile international politics that he obtained funding to study Goa in 1955 and travel around Angola and Mozambique as of 1960. He had, in fact, managed to convince a number of influential politicians that it was necessary to have sound knowledge of the territories that were mostly ignored at the scientific level. This pioneering research was undertaken both by himself and by his first disciples, Raquel Soeiro de Brito, Mariano Feio and Francisco Tenreiro.

Conditions suddenly improved after this financially difficult phase. In 1959, CEG-UL was offered good premises on the new University campus, but it was mainly due to the unexpected establishment of the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian [Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation] in Portugal and to the decision of its directors to prioritise the funding of innovative artistic and scientific activity lines, that CEG-UL managed to offer internships abroad, thus enabling young geographers to acquire new, efficient study techniques and many quality publications, among which the long-standing dream publication of the Finisterra  journal.

In 1960, as a young French geographer, I just happened to discover Portugal and travel in the country in the company of Orlando Ribeiro, who I eventually married in 1965, having then begun to collaborate in the activities of CEG-UL. I had been educated in Paris at the end of the war by the direct disciples of the masters with whom Orlando Ribeiro had become acquainted in the run-up to the conflict. Our education was therefore quite similar, mine being enriched by the sudden technical progress resulting from the vast and free dissemination of American aerial photographs, which for the first time enabled a detailed overview of the topography and human occupation of the globe, thus giving rise to rapid progress in world cartography.

By this time Orlando Ribeiro had succeeded single-handedly in placing Portugal on the world map, thanks to his successive journeys along the Atlantic and in Africa from 1935, in Spain and throughout the Mediterranean world from 1946, in America in 1952 and in India in 1956.

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