The Roma Community Day is celebrated on the 24th of June, and the anthropologist and investigator José Pereira Bastos has labelled the date as ‘worsening’ the social attitudes against the community.

Bastos also said that the ‘only Portuguese racism’ is targeted against the Roma, or gypsies as they are referred to in Portugal, who have been systematically discriminated against since their arrival in the fifteen hundreds.

The academic cites illiteracy, poverty, homelessness, hunger, police violence and ostracisation as the tools of a sustained and institutional racism against the gypsy community in Portugal.