Centro

Overview

Centro is the part of Portugal that the motorway between Lisbon and Porto passes through at 120 km/h, and the part that holds most of what the country put on the UNESCO list. Within an hour’s drive of each other sit the university at Coimbra, chartered in 1290, the monasteries of Batalha and Alcobaça, the Templar Convent of Christ at Tomar and the shrine at Fátima, where three shepherd children reported the Virgin in 1917.

The chapter runs from the Atlantic to Spain and changes character three times. The coast, the Silver Coast, is Aveiro and its lagoon, the long sandy beaches down to Figueira da Foz, and the Oeste towns south of them: Nazaré with its winter waves, walled Óbidos, Peniche and the Berlengas islands. Behind it, the old Beira provinces are river valleys and granite towns, Coimbra on the Mondego at their centre, with the Bairrada and Dão wine regions on either side. The interior climbs to the Serra da Estrela, the highest range on the mainland, and beyond it to the fortress towns and schist villages of the Spanish border, the emptiest country south of the Douro.

It is also the cheapest of the mainland chapters to eat and sleep in, and, outside Fátima on 13 May and Nazaré on a big-wave weekend, the least crowded.

History & character

Lusitanians and Romans

The hill people of the Beiras were the Lusitanians, and their resistance to Rome under Viriathus between 147 and 139 BC is the founding story the region tells about its own stubbornness. Rome won and built: Conímbriga, 16 km south of Coimbra, is one of the largest Roman settlements excavated in the country, with tessellated floors and a forum, and Coimbra itself began as the Roman Aeminium in the 1st century.

The first capital and the Templars

Coimbra was the capital of the new kingdom in the 12th century; the Old Cathedral was begun after Afonso Henriques declared himself king in 1139 and chose the city as his seat, and he and his son Sancho I are buried in the Monastery of Santa Cruz, founded in 1131 and now a national pantheon. The frontier with the Moors ran along the Tagus, and the Knights Templar held it: the Castle of Almourol on its islet in the river and the castle-convent at Tomar, built by the order’s master Gualdim Pais in the late 12th century, were the line.

Aljubarrota, Batalha and the Cistercians

The battle that secured the country’s independence from Castile was fought here, at Aljubarrota between Leiria and Alcobaça, on 14 August 1385; the Batalha Monastery was built in thanks and became the burial church of the Aviz kings. Two centuries earlier the Cistercians had been given the land at Alcobaça and built the abbey that runs the town, 120 km north of Lisbon; the university, after wandering between Lisbon and Coimbra, settled in Coimbra for good in 1537 and has shaped the city ever since.

Wars on the border and the 20th century

The eastern Beiras were the invasion route from Spain, which is why the border is lined with star forts: Almeida, on the Côa, is the most complete. Napoleon’s armies came this way in 1810, and the Lines of Torres Vedras, in the Oeste, were the earthworks that stopped them short of Lisbon. The 20th century gave the region two things that still define it: Fátima, which grew from a hamlet into one of the largest Marian shrines in the world after 1917, and the Salazar regime, which came out of Coimbra’s economics faculty and, in 1938, ran the competition that named Monsanto “the most Portuguese village in Portugal”.

The region’s identity is the sum of those layers: the first capital, the Templars’ frontier, the victory that kept the country independent, and a border that spent five centuries expecting the next invasion.

See & do

The three monasteries

Batalha, Alcobaça and Tomar are usually done as one loop and deserve two days. The Batalha Monastery is flamboyant Gothic shading into Manueline, built to commemorate Aljubarrota and to bury the Aviz kings, UNESCO-listed since 1983; the Unfinished Chapels at the back, roofless for five centuries, are the reason to go round the outside. The Alcobaça Monastery, Cistercian and plainer, has the tombs of Pedro I and Inês de Castro facing each other across the transept and a kitchen with a river running through it. The Convent of Christ at Tomar is the strangest of the three: a 12th-century Templar round church, a Manueline chapter-house window carved with ropes and coral, and cloister after cloister added by the Order of Christ; entry is a few euros and free on Sunday mornings.

Coimbra and the Romans

The University of Coimbra’s old quarter on the hilltop, the Paço das Escolas, holds the Joanina library, the Manueline chapel and the examination hall, sold as one timed ticket. Conímbriga, 16 km south, opens daily from 10 to 6 with the best Roman floor tiling in the country and a museum. Portugal dos Pequenitos, the miniature-monument park across the river, is the city’s answer for children.

Coast and islands

The Silver Coast is a straight run of sand from Espinho to Nazaré, with the lagoon beaches around Aveiro, Figueira da Foz at the mouth of the Mondego and the surf towns of Nazaré and Peniche. From Peniche, summer boats run to the Berlengas, a nature reserve of granite islets 10 to 17 km offshore with a fort, a lighthouse and no permanent residents; visitor numbers are capped. The Castle of Óbidos and its wall walk, and the four golf resorts around the town, are the Oeste’s other draws.

Mountains and rock art

The Serra da Estrela Natural Park has a road to the top of Torre at 1,993 m, the mainland’s only ski resort with nine short runs from December to April, glacial valleys for walking and the shepherds’ cheese for lunch; no permit or fee. On the far north-eastern edge of the region, the Côa valley rock art, thousands of open-air engravings of horses, aurochs and ibex from 22,000 to 10,000 BC, is a transboundary World Heritage site with Siega Verde in Spain, visited on guided jeep tours booked through the park museum at Vila Nova de Foz Côa. Bussaco forest, above Mealhada, and the Lousã and Caramulo ranges are the smaller mountain days.

The park museum itself, a concrete wedge above the meeting of the Côa and the Douro, is worth the visit even without a tour, and Vila Nova de Foz Côa is a reasonable overnight between the Douro and the Serra da Estrela.

Towns & cities

Coimbra

Coimbra is the university town, and the university sits on the hill above the Mondego with the whole city arranged around it: the Alta on top, the Baixa of shops and cafés below, Santa Clara across the river. The university is a World Heritage site since 2013; its Joanina library, baroque and bat-guarded, is the single most visited room in the region. The Old Cathedral, the New Cathedral up by the university and the Monastery of Santa Cruz in the Baixa are the churches; the Machado de Castro museum, in the former bishop’s palace, has the sculpture and the Roman cryptoporticus underneath. Coimbra fado, sung by men in black capes, is the city’s own tradition, distinct from Lisbon’s.

Aveiro

Aveiro is the lagoon city: canals through the centre navigated by painted moliceiro boats, art nouveau and art deco facades from its industrial boom, and a university that keeps 12,500 students in town. It was a Roman salt town and a cod-fishing port into the 1970s; Ílhavo next door still has the maritime museum and the Vista Alegre porcelain factory, founded in the early 1800s and open for tours. The beaches at Barra and Costa Nova, with its striped houses, are five minutes by car or an hourly bus, and the city lends out bicycles for free through the BUGA scheme.

Tomar

Tomar was born inside the walls of the Templar castle and grew into a small grid-planned town on the Nabão, with the Convent of Christ above it, the Templar burial church of Santa Maria do Olival, the 16th-century Pegões aqueduct running 6 km out to the convent, and, near the station, a museum of matchboxes. Hourly trains from Lisbon take about two hours.

Nazaré and Óbidos

Nazaré is a fishing village that became a surf capital: Praia do Norte holds the record for the biggest waves ever surfed, thrown up by a submarine canyon just offshore, and the winter swells draw crowds to the lighthouse on the Sítio headland, which a funicular connects to the beach. The rest of the year it is a beach town of cheap grilled-fish places in the back streets and women in seven-layered skirts renting rooms at the bus station. Óbidos, inland, is a walled hilltop town of whitewash and bougainvillea with a castle you can sleep in as a pousada, a walkable circuit of ramparts, an improbable number of bookshops, and ginja served in chocolate cups on every corner; an hourly coach from Lisbon’s Campo Grande takes exactly an hour.

The monastery towns and Fátima

Batalha and Alcobaça are small towns arranged around their monasteries, worth a lunch each. Leiria, between them, is the second city of the region with a restored castle; Fátima, a hamlet until 1917, is now a town of hotels and souvenir shops around the sanctuary’s vast esplanade. Caldas da Rainha, in the Oeste, is the unassuming one, a spa town of sulphur springs, ceramics and a daily fruit market.

The interior

Viseu, on the high ground between the Dão and the Mondego, has a Romanesque and Gothic cathedral and the Grão Vasco museum of Renaissance painting; Guarda, at over 1,000 m, is the highest city on the mainland, with a cathedral that took from 1390 to the mid-16th century to finish. Castelo Branco, in the south-east, has a Templar castle and the formal gardens of the bishop’s palace; Monsanto, a village of houses built between and under granite boulders, and Belmonte, with its Jewish quarter, are the day trips from it.

Food & drink

The region’s dish is the suckling pig of the Bairrada, leitão: a piglet of about a month, salted and peppered, spit-roasted for two hours in a wood oven until the skin cracks, served with orange slices and washed down with the local sparkling wine, and one of the seven wonders of Portuguese gastronomy. Mealhada, on the old Lisbon-Porto road north of Coimbra, is where the restaurants line up for it.

The mountains give the cheese. Queijo Serra da Estrela is made from the milk of the local sheep by the shepherds of the park, guarded by the Serra dog, semi-liquid when young and sliceable when aged, with a protected designation of origin and a market of industrial imitations to avoid. Inland the cooking is goat and pork: chanfana, old goat stewed in red wine in a clay pot, is the Beira dish, and the Beira Baixa does smoked sausages and honey.

Wine comes from two demarcated regions either side of Coimbra. The Bairrada, a narrow coastal strip, makes the sparkling wine that goes with the pig and firm reds from the Baga grape; the Dão, inland in the granite hills around Viseu, is one of the oldest demarcated regions in the country, a DOC since 1908 and the home of Touriga Nacional, the grape that anchors port. The Oeste has half a dozen small DOCs of its own around Alenquer, Torres Vedras and Óbidos, and Óbidos’s real drink is ginja, the sour-cherry liqueur. Licor Beirão, the herb liqueur that is the country’s most drunk spirit, comes from Lousã in the hills south-east of Coimbra.

Nature

The Serra da Estrela Natural Park is the biggest protected area in the country at about 1,000 km², more than half of it above 700 m, spread over six municipalities from Seia to Guarda; the Mondego, the Zêzere and the Alva all rise on its plateau, and the summit, Torre, is a flat top with a road rather than a peak. Glacial valleys, the Zêzere’s being the textbook example, drop from it towards Manteigas; the economy on the ground is still sheep, goats, cheese and chestnut basketwork.

The coast has the region’s other two reserves. The Ria de Aveiro is a lagoon of about 75 km² behind a barrier of dunes from Espinho to Mira, with salt pans, seaweed beds and the São Jacinto dunes at its mouth, and the beaches of Barra, Costa Nova and Torreira along its seaward edge. Off Peniche, the Berlengas are a nature reserve of seabird cliffs and clear water, with a daily cap on landings in summer.

Climate

The coast and the mountains have almost nothing in common. Aveiro and the Silver Coast are humid and temperate: warm summers, wet but not cold winters, with November to January the rainy months and strong coastal winds in autumn and winter that make the lagoon a kitesurfing spot. The sea is Atlantic-cold all year.

The Serra da Estrela is the coldest place on the mainland: snow lies on the high ground from December into April, sometimes with the help of cannons at the ski resort, and summer afternoons on the plateau are fresh when Coimbra, 80 km away, is at 35°C. The Beira Baixa and the border country to the east are the hot, dry interior, with continental swings between summer heat and winter frost. Pack for the sea and for altitude on the same trip, and bring a windproof layer for the coast in any month.

When to go

April to June and September to October are the months for the monasteries, Coimbra and the coast: warm, mostly dry, and before or after the domestic holiday crush of August, when the beaches from Figueira to Nazaré fill with Portuguese families. Coimbra’s student calendar sets its own rhythm: the Queima das Fitas in May, when graduating students burn their faculty ribbons, is a week of parades and concerts and the city’s loudest week of the year.

Winter is the Serra da Estrela’s season, for skiing from December to April, and the off-season for everything else; many of Nazaré’s and Peniche’s hotels and restaurants close from November to Easter.

Getting there

Centro has no airport of its own and does not need one: Lisbon and Porto are both within two hours, and the Linha do Norte, the main Lisbon-Porto railway, runs straight through it with Alfa Pendular and Intercidades stops at Coimbra-B and Aveiro. Coimbra is about an hour from Porto and two from Lisbon by road on the A1, the same times by fast train.

The Oeste is Lisbon’s side of the region: the A8 motorway runs from the capital to Leiria with exits for Torres Vedras, Óbidos and Caldas da Rainha, the Rápida Verde coach from Campo Grande reaches Óbidos in an hour, and Rede Expressos serves Nazaré, Peniche and Alcobaça from Sete Rios. Tomar has an hourly direct train from Lisbon, about two hours.

Getting around

The coast and the two cities work without a car; everything else is easier with one. Aveiro and Coimbra are walkable, with the caveat that Coimbra is steep and its centre was laid out for donkeys: leave the car by the river. Aveiro has free bikes and cycle paths to the beach; Coimbra has the SMTUC buses, the Pantufinhas minibus through the old town and the market lift up the hill.

Transdev runs the regional buses across the Beiras, Rodoviária do Oeste the coast south of Nazaré, and Rodoviária do Tejo the Tomar area; timetables are built around schools and shrink on weekends. For the Serra da Estrela, the border villages and the Côa, there is no realistic alternative to driving: the N339 crosses the park over the top of Torre, and the N17 and N16 skirt it. Secondary roads wind through every hamlet and make the region feel twice its size.

Practical info

National basics, currency, plugs, tipping and emergency numbers, are in the Portugal guide. Regionally, a few things to know.

Fátima runs on its own calendar: on 12 and 13 May and 12 and 13 October the town and the roads around it are given over to pilgrims, hotels are booked far ahead, and the sanctuary asks for quiet and modest dress at all times. The Berlengas cap daily visitors in summer, so book the Peniche boat rather than turning up.

Coimbra’s students wear black capes and expect to be photographed; ask. Nazaré’s room-renters at the bus station are a legitimate tradition and usually the cheapest bed in town, but look at the room before you agree. Caldas da Rainha has the Oeste’s only public hospital, and the nationwide pharmacy line 1400 will tell you which pharmacy is on night duty.