Instituto de Ciências Biomédicas Abel Salazar, Porto

Here, the study of health reaches well beyond human patients: ICBAS teaches medicine alongside veterinary medicine, aquatic-environment sciences, biochemistry, and bioengineering. This is the University of Porto’s school for biomedical and life sciences, carrying the name of the Porto physician Abel Salazar. The institute took shape in May nineteen seventy-five, soon after Portugal’s democratic revolution, beginning in an annex of the university’s rectorate.

Its founders set out to combine strong fundamentals with advanced study, research, and innovation. That broad ambition still defines the place: medicine students meet clinical work early in their training, while the school’s courses bring scientific, social, biological, and medical perspectives together. Its guiding thought is deliberately demanding: knowing medicine alone is not enough to truly understand medicine.

The words appear in the main hall of the older building. They suit a school whose community includes more than three thousand five hundred students from about twenty nationalities, including over seven hundred and fifty doctoral candidates. The institute’s buildings are associated with architects Joaquim da Costa Lima Júnior and Baltazar da Silva Castro.