Friday’s main event was a morning walking tour of Coimbra University, the famous Library and a bit of old central Coimbra. We met Tiago, our guide for the morning, at 9:30 in the lobby.

The University was founded in 1290, making it one of the oldest in Europe. It has about 40,000 enrolled students. A key attraction is the Library, which has an extensive collection of very old books that students and scholars can access (1). The Library is such a popular site that admission is by reservation only, in 15 minute intervals. Your visit is divided into a 20 minute section and a 10 minute section, all of which is enforced strictly by docents. Also, photography is strictly forbidden in the most interesting part of the tour, the reading room where there are thousands of ancient books arranged on 12’ high bookshelves, on two levels.

We learned more than you need to know about how the books are maintained and how the librarians use cleverly designed ladders to reach the upper shelves. But I can’t show you any pictures of this because I have none.

After leaving the library, we toured some of the older university buildings. We saw the hall where Ph.D. theses are defended, where the Chancellor gives his speeches, where the portraits of every Chancellor since the 16th century are hung.

We saw the cells where students were imprisoned for offenses adjudicated by the University. It turns out that the University, since its founding, has had a significant degree of independence from the normal civil authorities, with police not allowed on campus without permission. We see vestiges of this in American colleges, where some security officers are actually “peace officers”, empowered to make arrests.

After finishing with the University, we started walking downhill into the old part of Coimbra, passing shops, homes and restaurants. Lots of restaurants. The University is at the highest point in the city. The taxi ride up was like going up a funicular in Switzerland, but the walk down was pretty easy ;-).

After wandering around for a while with Tiago, he found a restaurant for us and spent some time helping us make sure that the food would meet our needs. It turned out to be one of the better meals we’ve had so far, so we may go back another day.

Back at the hotel we decided to check out the garden, which is really a private park. But I wrote about that in the last post, so I won’t repeat it here.

We sat around the hotel room, and then about 7:00pm I realized that we had a reservation for Fado (2) at 6:00pm! Given that it was a 50 minute show, the opportunity was gone. We ultimately were able to contact our travel outfitter who rescheduled us for Saturday. I felt like a complete idiot.

I walked across the river to a brew pub and had dinner. They were supposed to have live music, but the three piece band spent two hours setting up and I got bored of waiting for them to start, so I left. But the beer was good.

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(1) Tiago suggested that they hardly ever do so.

(2) Fado is a traditional Portuguese music genre; the Lisbon and Coimbra varieties are apparently very different. I’ll write more about it after we go. If we can remember to go.