Luz Soriano was born into a humble family. His mother was a serving maid and his father a barber. His father abandoned his mother and moved to Brazil when Soriano was only two years old and so his mother left him at his grandmother’s house near Alcobaça.

At the time of the French invasions, Luz Soriano returned to Lisbon to be with his mother. Thanks to the help of a religious uncle, he entered the Lisbon Casa Pia school in 1811. In 1816 he started an apprenticeship to learn to be a goldsmith. His vocation for studies, though, led him to enrol in the first year of the Royal Naval Academy in 1823. In 1825 he managed to achieve the highest goal of a poor student: to obtain the necessary financing to be able to enrol in the University of Coimbra. His sponsor was the Baron of Rendufe, the Intendant-General of Police. He matriculated in the Faculty of Mathematics and in the Faculty of Philosophy but the political agitation the country was experiencing prevented him from devoting his time to his studies.

In the 1827-28 academic year, when he was 26, he enlisted as a volunteer in the academic corps, taking part in the anti-Miguelist revolt in Porto in May 1828. When the insurrection was defeated, the army - students included - led by Bernardo de Sá Nogueira fled to Galicia, and from there to Plymouth where they were held in a warehouse stocking timber for ships. Some months later, in February 1829, the young university students and the rest of the soldiers were transferred to the island of Terceira in the Azores where they remained until June 1832. Finally they set sail for Porto, at the time surrounded by Miguelist troops, where Soriano asked to be posted to the Serra do Pilar, the most dangerous defensive position in the city. He spent some time there until Sá Nogueira, Minister of the Navy in D. Pedro’s government, requisitioned him in December 1832 to work with him as a “first-class amanuensis”.

After the war ended, he stayed on at the Ministry until 1837. In that year he returned to Coimbra to study Medicine, taking advantage of the provisions of the Charter of Law of 20 October 1834 under which university students who had emigrated were allowed to conclude their training at the state’s expense. He finished his course in 1842 at the age of forty.

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