Porto is the second largest city in Portugal after Lisbon, and is the heart of the port wine industry. With our new driver Pedro (1), we left Coimbra this morning for our next stop there, which is where we will be for four nights. But we made a couple of stops along the way, which made the actual trip about 100 miles and 2 1/2 hours.

The first stop was the Santa Cruz of Bossaco Convent, located in a forested national park.

The Convent is an austere building with elaborate art inside. In the picture above, the smaller, left half of the structure, is the Convent. The elaborate right half is a former Palace, now converted to a hotel.

One of the touristy things at the Convent is to climb the bell tower and ring the bell. It’s only four flights up a very narrow, stone, spiral staircase, so I went up. About 3 flights up you pass the old clockworks that used to ring the bell on a predetermined schedule, which obviously doesn’t work anymore. At the top, I rang the bell – it’s extremely loud when you’re standing next to it.

While only a few tourists were visiting the Convent, dozens of locals were coming up the long hill to go hiking and trail running in the surrounding national park.

After leaving Bossaco we headed to a fishing village called Cosa Nova, about an hour away. Since we had finished an hour early, Pedro said we would get to Cosa Nova early for our 1:00 lunch reservation. When we got there, we didn’t see any fisherman or fishing boats – it looked exactly like many other beach towns we’ve been to. Lots of people walking around, kids, t-shirt and beach toy shops, restaurants.

One thing is unique, however. Many of the buildings – mostly homes – along the main drag, facing the bay, have a unique striped design. Pedro said this was so the returning fishermen could pick out their house from a distance even in bad weather. I suppose that’s plausible, but today there are no docks anywhere near these homes.

The restaurant, which had been suggested by our travel outfitters (3) and reserved by Pedro, turned out to be very good. Even if we had to eat bream, which was a first for both of us (2).

Porto is a big city compared to Sintra and Coimbra. The metro area has a population of 1.8 million, while the city center remains compact and walkable. Our hotel is the Torel Palace Porto, another converted palace! But more about that in the next post.

(1) One of the things we really disliked about our Morocco trip (which we enjoyed overall) was having the driver and guide travel with us for the full two weeks, including the guide taking one of the domestic flights with us. They were nice enough people, but this was too much togetherness. Here, we get a new “expert” guide for each tour, and drivers in each region. And we never have two at the same time. Even though we saw Jorge for three days, it didn’t feel like we were living with him. Pedro told us that today was the only day he’s booked with us.

(2) I had no idea what a bream was, so I looked in Wikipedia. It is a generic name for a large number of species. Therefore, we don’t really know what we ate. It might be sea bream, which is similarly vague. But it was a catch of the day, so it was fresh.

(3) Canastra do Fidalgo Av. Marginal José Estevão, 240 +351 234 394 859

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.

(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.

Warning: this post is a rant about our hotel. If that sounds boring, please don’t waste your time reading it.

We arrived at our hotel, the Quinta das Lagrimas, in Coimbra around 4:30 yesterday afternoon after a long day and several stops on the trip from Sintra. You’ll recall from yesterday’s post that we saw the crypts of Pedro & Ines, the lovers who had serious in-law problems. This hotel, which (of course) used to be a royal palace, was where they were hooking up behind his father’s back (1).

It may sound cool to be staying in a former royal palace, but none of them were built in the last 200 years. Quinta das Lagrimas was built in 1326 (2). And in most cases, they were pretty much abandoned for years before someone scraped together the cash to buy and fix them up enough to get paying guests. So many of the systems and furnishings are, let us say, not Four Seasons caliber.

Our room is dark and poorly set up. It’s one of those rooms where all of the light comes from lamps. The 25’ x 9’ sitting room has two floor lamps, each with a single 60 watt-equivalent bulb. It’s furnished with a contemporary, very uncomfortable couch and a very old fashioned, very uncomfortable armchair.

The bedroom is twice as large, and has three lamps and six sconces which have much smaller bulbs – I’d guess 15W equivalents. There are windows all over the place, but even during the middle of the day it’s dim. At night it’s really dim.

One of the facts of modern travel is that we’ve stopped carrying a suitcase full of books, but traded that for a bunch of mobile devices – phones, tablets, cameras – that need charging. So we need outlets. This room has one outlet for each lamp. So charging anything on your night table is not possible, unless you’re willing to give up the lamps. The TV has an extra outlet, so we can charge our stuff there. There’s a desk which has one outlet for the lamp. So no charging there if you want to be able to see anything.

The shower is a tub shower, which means you need to step over a fairly high ledge to get in and out. We get two bath towels. I understand that we are only two people, but really, for this price, they could give us one or two extra.

On the positive side, there is a private park on the grounds – they call it a garden. It’s a pleasant place to take a stroll.

You can also see the Fountain of Love where Pedro and Ines hooked up, and the Fountain of Tears where she was assassinated murdered by her prospective father-in-law, the King (3).

(1) “Lagrimas” means tears, as Ines’ tears stained the fountain in the courtyard here. We looked and didn’t see this.

(2) It says “Since 1326” on the doormat in front of the hotel.

(3) To be fair, I found what might be a non-fairy tale version of what actually happened. I was totally unable to follow it – it involved cousins, adultery, Kings planning to invade other Kings, etc. Both Pedro and Ines were involved, possibly on more than one side (there appear to be more than two sides involved). It made the scheming and shenanigans from Succession seem simple and straightforward.

We checked out of our digs in Sintra first thing for a long day of traveling while making stops along the way.

Our first stop was Obidos, a very popular medieval walled city and tourist attraction. We both remember being here 35 years ago, but didn’t remember very much about it, so Jorge, our driver, explained the deal. The walled city is maybe 3/4 of a mile long and very skinny; everyone enters at a gate at the lowest point (after buying a ticket, of course) and walks up to the far end, and then back. There are side streets – little more than short alleys on the uphill side, and not much more on the downhill side. And then everyone walks back down to the entrance gate.

Both sides of the main street are lined with shops selling the usual tourist stuff. They also have a few more unusual things that are big sellers. One is little cups of hot chocolate, where the cups are also made out of chocolate. Another is some specialty liquors, which I didn’t really spend much time looking at. And of course bars and restaurants.

At the very end of the street is a large, interesting bookstore. It carries mostly Portuguese language books, of course, but does have a selection of other languages including English. I saw lots of browsers, but no actual buyers while we were there. But the store itself is quite unique from a design perspective.

From there we went to a seaside town called Nazare’ for lunch. We had a long discussion with Jorge about where to eat. In Portugal, the big meal of the day is lunch and when people are out, they will often go to a nice restaurant and spend a couple of hours. We are not most people. We stay at fancy hotels and have hamburgers for dinner. After much back and forth as he tried to understand these crazy Americans, he took us to a seaside snack bar with spectacular views of a very large beach, big cliffs and the Atlantic Ocean (1). The staff were fantastic, and the food was very good.

At the town square above town, you have an even more spectacular view of the beach and Obidos. The square also has the usual tourist traps merchants, including several ladies – who looked like sisters – all wearing seven layers of skirts. Jorge gave us some nonsensical explanation, but I think the reasons are buried in history and now it’s just a thing. There are also people walking out on a rocky ledge for photos, ready to ensure they don’t propagate their stupidity.

Our final stop for the day was in Alcobaca, where we visited the UNESCO World Heritage Alcobaca Monastery. The Monastery was a huge and impressive building, and like Monserrate Palace, devoid of almost any furnishings. It was founded by the Portuguese King in the 12th century, was the richest in the country by the 14th, and dissolved along with the rest of the powerful religious orders in Portugal by 1834. At its peak, more than 1,000 monks lived there. Very quietly.

Perhaps the most historic and well known aspect of the Monastery is the tombs of Pedro and Ines. The so-called “Romeo and Juliet of Portugal” is actually a pretty gruesome story: Pedro’s father, King Alfonso IV, disapproved of his girlfriend. So he had her assassinated murdered in 1355. By the time Pedro died he was King, and so he had his beloved interred in the Monastery chapel along with his remains. I can understand not always liking who your kids are dating, but seriously … .

We finally got to our hotel in Coimbra around 4:30. But that’s another post.

(1) This is not the view from the restaurant, the restaurant is the building on the beach closest to the camera.

Last night I walked back into old Sintra for some dinner. It’s a bit less than a mile, and downhill towards town. By the time I got there, almost all of the tourists were gone and almost all of the restaurants were closed. I found a small place, had a mediocre meal, and then walked back in the dark.

Today was our full day in the Sintra region. So after a full breakfast at the hotel, we got back in the car with Jorge and headed out. We were scheduled for a half day tour – first a stop at an old palace and gardens, and then a seaside lunch.

The first stop was Monserrate Palace, a short drive from the hotel. Jorge explained that our plan, which most people followed, was to first walk to the Palace itself and spend about 45 minutes there, and then optionally walk around the gardens, which are beautiful and could take another half hour or so. Our lunch reservation was timed according to this plan.

But somehow we got lost shortly after leaving the entrance to the estate and wound up walking through a good part of the gardens. Which was fine, except that it involved walking into a deep valley and not knowing how to find the Palace itself. When we at the very bottom, we found a gardener who pointed us in the right direction, which was uphill. By the time we got to the Palace after more than 45 minutes, we were both pretty hot and tired.

The Palace was originally built by someone in the 18th century, and bought by Francis Cook, a wealthy Englishman in the mid-19th century. He refurbished it to be a summer home for his family. The government acquired the property in 1949.

The Palace itself is a magnificant building with no furnishings. So while the architecture was interesting, merely looking at pencil illustrations of how the furnishings might have looked was meh. We spent all of 15 minutes in the Palace, and I looked in all of the accessible rooms. The walls were ornate, the ceilings very fancy, and every room looked the same. The only way you could distinguish the Living Room (where the ladies hung out) from the Billiards Room (for the gents) was the sign in the middle of the rooms.

As I mentioned, we were tired by the time we reached the Palace, and the 15 minutes there didn’t really give us time to fully recover. Jorge had mentioned that they ran a shuttle to the Palace from the entrance, so after starting the climb back we called him and asked him to send it down. Unfortunately, it was 12:15 and the driver was out to lunch. So our choice was waiting 45++ minutes, or attempting to finish the walk out. It turned out to only be about 20 minutes back to the entrance, and much less strenuous than the climb from the depths of the garden to the Palace.

After expressing our displeasure, we headed off to lunch. This was at a seafood restaurant overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and a small beach (1). The view was impressive, and the staff very friendly and accomodating. Sally enjoyed her Tiger shrimp, while I forced down some tuna steak.

When we got back to our room, housekeeping was cleaning the room and had removed our space heater. After some heated (2) discussion, the head of housekeeping swore that the engineers had just finished repairing the building’s heating system, and asked us to wait a while to see if the radiators in our room were in fact heating up. As I’m writing this, it’s been about two hours and it’s still blowing room-temperature air into the room.

We hung around the room the rest of the afternoon, as we were pretty tired both from jet lag and our hill-walking at Monserrate. In the evening there was a wedding in a ballroom just down the hall from us, but it ended early and the noise wasn’t too much of a burden.

(1) This is only the second time I recall seeing the Atlantic from its eastern side, with the first being last year in Casablanca.

(2) See what I did here?

I know this is a bit out of order after my rant last night regarding the heat situation, but here it is.

Our 10:00pm flight last night left a little late, and consequently arrived a little late this morning in Lisbon. We wandered around the enormous baggage claim area for a while looking for the belt with our luggage, and then still had to wait a while for our luggage. Despite the so-called “priority handling” tags they put on the bags when we checked them in New York, they were definitely not prioritized getting out of the plane and back into our hands. However, they did arrive, It took a phone call to locate Jorge, our pre-arranged driver, but that also worked out.

And we set out for Sintra.

Sintra is a small town about 20 miles (30 km) from Lisbon airport, which is in the hills and was an out-of-town place for the royals and other rich folk back in the day. It’s much cooler than Lisbon because of the elevation and the winds, so they all decamped here for the summers while the men had ready access to the city should they be needed for affairs of state, or of any kind.

Jorge, our driver, is a pleasant fellow and gave us a lot of information as we proceeded on the highway from the airport, and then on the increasingly narrow roads into old Sintra. Many of the roads in this area have been changed to one-way as tourism and traffic has increased over the last 20 years. In fact, traffic in the older section of town is horrible. You just creep along in stop and go traffic on mostly single lane roads while taxis, busses and other cars stop to drop off and pick up passengers.

Several of the key sights – the Pena Palace (shown in yesterday’s post) and others – now are accessible only with a timed reservation, and the lines we drove by looked daunting. I doubt we will try to visit any of those overcrowded places tomorrow when we go for a tour.

We’re staying in an old palace – originally built in 1786 – which was taken over by the state in 1955 and leased to a succession of hotel operators over the years. We have a suite overlooking the back yard on the first floor which is quite spacious, and looks like it was decorated quite some time ago.

Since our room wasn’t ready, we made the 20 minute walk to the main square in old Sintra, which is predictably surrounded by restaurants, sweet shops, souvenir shops and very busy. After looking around a bit, we settled on a place to eat lunch with outside tables. Fortunately, they had plexiglass screens around the dining patio because it was pretty windy. The temperature is about 72F, which is chilly if you’re sitting still and it’s windy.

Getting back was a different story. While it’s about 20 minutes down to town, the operative word here is “down”. Walking back up to the hotel would have taken at least twice as long and would have been tiring. No worries – they have Uber here. But like Uber back home, the drivers can refuse the call and apparently no one was interested in creeping the few miles in the stop and go traffic to make a few euros. A taxi on the corner basically refused for the same reason. But then the driver arranged a deal where we shared a ride with another couple going in our direction but much further; the deal was we paid EUR 10, and they other couple paid the meter perhaps minus our EUR 10 (I’m not sure). Anyway, we made it back