I love a good castle. As far as I’m concerned, going inside an ancient fortification beats the vaulted interior of any church. (I’m a sufferer of ABC syndrome; Another Bloody Cathedral.) So I was very excited about checking out the Convento de Cristo in Portugal, which was founded by the crusading Order of the Knights […]
You might’ve seen Dave’s recent post on Coimbra and the delicious hog roast we ate at a local restaurant. When travelling through Portugal, it didn’t take long to realise that pork was the country’s speciality. In Porto, we discovered a restaurant on the same street as our boutique hotel called Museu de Presunto, or ‘Museum […]
The taxi driver who picked us up at Lisbon airport at the start of our Portugal travels gave us some friendly advice. He said: ‘Go to Algarve for the beach, Lisbon for culture, Oporto for wine and Coimbra for learning.’ Indeed. Coimbra, in the central region known as the Beiras, hosts Portugal’s oldest university that gleams […]
The Portuguese are very stylish and intensely proud of their art, food, culture and history. The fiercest examples of this pride were on display in Porto, the great city sitting astride the Douro River and the Atlantic Ocean. Porto is world famous for its architecture, which is a heady mix of the ancient, the modern […]
Hit the twisting highway north from Lisbon and you’ll find yourself in a landscape a little like the mid-west region of Western Australia. The bleached yellow sunlight beats down on undulating land pocked with little settlements and green bursts of forest and scrub. There are rows and rows of towering eucalyptus trees lining the road […]
