Other disciples of Ribeiro chose to adopt a trend that was dominant at the time: an early specialisation in one of the branches of Geography, such as Geomorphology, Climatology, Organisation of Space, Historical or Economic Geography. This was the case of Jorge Gaspar, for instance, who having published an excellent article of historical Geography in 1970 on “Os portos fluviais do Tejo” [“The inland ports of the Tagus River”], devoted his doctoral thesis to a “system of central functions and places”: A Área de Influência de Évora [The Area of Influence of Évora] (1972), thus becoming supervisor of a large group of disciples.

Orlando Ribeiro retired in February 1981 and although the next generation of geographers had ceased to be officially his students, several of them continued to seek his company. In 1986, CEG-UL published a second (and last) volume of the collection Chorographia, Série Historica, featuring an extensive study on the O Espaço Medieval da Reconquista no Sudoeste da Península Ibérica [The Mediaeval Space in the Reconquest of the South-western Iberian Peninsula], by João Carlos Garcia.

Ten years later, Garcia obtained his doctorate with an in-depth study of A Navegação no Baixo Guadiana durante o Ciclo do Minério (1857-1917) [Navigation in the Lower Guadiana River during the Iron Ore Cycle (1857-1917)], which addresses both the physical navigability of the river and the economic and political circumstances which, for several decades, had given rise to an animated navigation in its entrance section.

In 1986, Júlia Galego and I jointly organised Memoria do C.E.G. [CEG Memorial] entitled Numeramento de 1517-1532. Tratamento Cartográfico [Population Count between 1517-1532 Cartographic Processing], that is, a study of the first general count of the Portuguese population in existence today. In 1987, it was Maria Fernanda Alegria, director of the Laboratório de Geomorfologia do CEG-UL [Geomorphology Lab of CEG-UL], who devoted her doctoral thesis to a theme that was purely historical at first sight: A Organização dos Transportes em Portugal (1850-1910). As Vias e o Tráfego [The Organisation of Transport in Portugal (1850-1910). Roads and Traffic], published in 1990 as Memória do C.E.G. It showed how the regional organisation of the mountains and the network of the navigable rivers crossing Portugal influenced the railway design and how this design became a settling element that strongly hindered the free evolution of national space.

Recent reeditions of much of the dispersed work of Orlando Ribeiro that I managed to make between 2013 and 2017, with the help of the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, offer easy access to his numerous scattered articles, particularly those resulting from the interest he always invested in the presence of Man on Earth and in the more or less dense and persistent mark imprinted on it by Man.   

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