In his view, history, the science of the reconstruction of the past, was a useful tool and rich source of data, as was also the Landscape (captured and recorded in hasty sketches scrawled on his field notebooks, and his countless, carefully selected photographs), and the other related sciences, Geology, Pre-History and Ethnology.

As a researcher, the historical theme he was most concerned about was undoubtedly the Formação de Portugal [Formation of Portugal]. As early as April 1939, this was the title chosen by the then young Lecturer of Portuguese at the Sorbonne for a conference held in Brussels at the Instituto de Cultura Portuguesa [Portuguese Culture Institute]. In 1955, he further examined the same theme in chapter III of his volume on Portugal published in Castilian, in Barcelona. In 1968, the Dicionário de História de Portugal [Dictionary of the History of Portugal], organised by Joel Serrão, featured a 19-page long article on this theme while Ribeiro busied himself preparing a book with the same title, which was to feature a collection of several of his previously published articles. However, this book was only published in 1987, in the Coleção Identidade [Identity Collection] of the Instituto de Cultura e Língua Portuguesa. Its 3000 copies have long sold out but a new edition with an introduction by João Carlos Garcia has been published by Editorial Letra Livre [Letra Livre Publishers].

In the meantime, Orlando Ribeiro continued his research on this theme and published Estudo Crítico às Introduções Geográficas à História de Portugal [Critical Essay on the Geographical Introductions to the History of Portugal] in 1977 in the Imprensa Nacional,  dedicated to “The History students from the Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa who for two decades accompanied my teachings on Human Geography.”  As stated in the preface, he discussed the work of several historians, either with admiration or harsh severity: “I have never forgotten that, while I have been a geographer for over forty years, it was the vocation of historian, grounded mainly in Herculano, that led me to the Faculdade de Letras where I met some remarkable, terrible and a few rare average professors.” This book features sharp criticism of the work of three well-known historians - Oliveira Martins (1845-1894), Jaime Cortesão (1884-1980) and António Sérgio (1883-1969) – and claims paradoxically, in conclusion, that the “long confrontation” that had been undertaken, “ended up (…) in failure (because) the least that could be said (…) was that the authors knew very little of what they purported to address. They refer to specific works without citing them and largely ignore most of the existing bibliography on the topic at the time. (…) I would like to ask historians to pay as much attention to Geography as the well-informed geographers have paid to their work.”

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