page_title: Coimbra Group
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Coimbra Group / History
caption_attribution_description: Baroque interior of Coimbra University Library, Portugal
context_page_description: The Coimbra Group is an international association of 39 universities in Europe. It was established in 1985.
context_section_description: The Coimbra Group was founded in 1985 and formally constituted in 1987 by a charter signed between its members, then numbering 19. In 1994 it published Charters of Foundation and Early Documents of the Universities of the Coimbra Group. A second edition was published in 2005, by which time Caen had left the group while Bergen, Geneva, Graz, Lyon, Padua, Tartu and Turku had joined.
  In 2013 the group consisted of 40 universities, but by the following year this had fallen to 37 with the departures of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece), the University of Cambridge (UK) and the University of Oxford (UK). Since then, the Group has added Vilnius University (Lithuania) in June 2015 and Durham University (UK) in June 2016. This brought the membership of the group to 39, but it subsequently fell to 38 in October 2016, when the University of Lyon (France) decided to leave the Group. At the General Assembly in June 2017, the University of Cologne was invited to join as the 39th member.
caption: The group takes its name from the city of Coimbra, Portugal and the university located there.
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