Her father, Jorge Pedro Martins Gomes, was an officer of the merchant marine and her mother, Maria Alice Rosa Gomes, a homemaker. Both were politically minded and opposed the authoritarian regime. In her teenage years, she accompanied her father to the rallies of the opposition movements Democratic Unity Electoral Commission (CEUD, "Comissão Eleitoral de Unidade Democrática") and the Portuguese Democratic Movement/Democratic Electoral Commissions (MDP/CDE, "Movimento Democrático Português/Comissões Democráticas Eleitorais") that unsuccessfully ran in the fraudulent 1969 legislative election, amid extensive harassment of opposition candidates and voter manipulation. Her parents allowed her and her sister a liberal education, initially at Colégio da Baforeira, a boarding school in Parede, and then the lyceum in São João do Estoril, and later still the Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho Lyceum in Lisbon, where she became an activist of the Associative Movement of the Lisbon Secondary Education Students (MAEESL, "Movimento Associativo de Estudantes do Ensino Secundário de Lisboa"), at the time led by Nuno Crato. In what she considered a "political act", Gomes formally requested to be released from religious education classes at school.