Coimbra Expects More Than 2,300 Mobility Students From 120 Countries This Year, and More Than 3,000 Brazilians Are Already Enrolled

The University of Coimbra held the first of three welcome sessions for incoming mobility students on Friday, and expects to break its own record again. Definitive figures for last year put the intake at 2,231 students; this year the forecast is more than 2,300, drawn from 120 countries.

"There is a dynamic of internationalisation here that I think is almost unstoppable, because year after year we have been breaking historic records," the vice-rector for external relations and alumni, João Nuno Calvão da Silva, told the Lusa agency.

Mobility students are those arriving for a semester or a full academic year under programmes such as Erasmus. They sit alongside a much larger standing population of foreign degree students, and in Coimbra one nationality dominates both categories.

Three thousand Brazilians, and a law faculty they come for

There are already more than 3,000 Brazilian students at Coimbra, many of them on academic mobility, and the vice-rector was specific about where they go. "Brazilians look a great deal to the Faculty of Law, and so do the Portuguese-speaking countries in general, because the law of those places is of Portuguese origin. And many times it was actually made by masters of the Coimbra Faculty of Law."

He meant that literally. The legal order of Macau, the special administrative region of the People's Republic of China, was drafted in part at Coimbra: the Civil Code by Paulo Mota Pinto, the Penal Code by Figueiredo Dias. The university has taught successive generations of students there under a cooperation agreement with the University of Macau running more than forty years.

A second link runs to Cabo Verde, and it is medical rather than legal. "The future doctors of Cabo Verde spend two years of their training here, within the integrated master's, under a cooperation agreement between the two states," Calvão da Silva said, an arrangement that mobilises both the University of Coimbra and the University of Cabo Verde.

The students the university cannot take

Coimbra was for centuries the only university in the Portuguese-speaking world, and the vice-rector's one regret is about the students who do not arrive. He would like more from the Portuguese-speaking African countries.

"It is a pity that we cannot have more, because very often they do not have the conditions to be here longer, notwithstanding what the Portuguese state allows, of their having lower tuition fees than other international students," he said. There is also a structural obstacle: the university cannot reserve places for them. "As a matter of equity and equality of opportunity, they have to compete with one another."

That is a fair description of the limit on Portuguese higher education's Lusophone reach. The fee discount exists, the cooperation agreements exist, and the demand plainly exists. What does not exist is a mechanism to convert any of that into a guaranteed seat.

What this means for expats

• Coimbra is a genuinely international campus: more than 2,300 mobility students from 120 countries arrive this year, on top of the standing foreign cohort.
• Law is the draw for Lusophone students: the shared Portuguese legal matrix, not the ranking, is what brings Brazilian and African students to that faculty.
• Places are won by competition: there are no reserved seats, and the national admissions round is tight, with nine in ten applicants placed in the first round.
• Residence paperwork is the other hurdle: Lisbon's law faculty has opened a dedicated AIMA channel to fast-track permits for foreign students and staff.
• The Macau model is spreading: Universidade Nova and a Macau university plan joint nanotechnology programmes, with the first Chinese students due in Lisbon in 2027.