Our holiday to Portugal was excellent. The weather was warm and sunny and the places we saw were widely diversified and very interesting.

One unforgettable experience in Lisbon was our visit to the Gulbenkian Museum, a modern building set in attractive grounds. The collection’s many beautiful artefacts were very well displayed in spacious surroundings.

Both Lisbon and Porto have lots of hills but a particularly hilly place was the World Heritage Site of Sintra, where we visited the hilltop Pena Palace, a former monastery taken over and extended by the royal family in the 19th century. Its architecture was fantastic, with towers and balconies, in a mixture of styles. We also visited the National Palace, in the centre of town. It started as a Moorish fort, but major parts date to royal renovation projects from the 13th century onwards. Much of its decoration is spectacular, especially a room with 27 swans painted on the ceiling and another with 136 magpies, this latter thought to represent the king’s view of the gossiping women at court! This palace also has two very distinctive tall chimneys.

We visited two other spectacular World Heritage Sites, the Mosteiros dos Jeronimos, in Lisbon, and the Mosteiro de Batalha. The first was constructed by King Manuel in 1502 after Vasco da Gama returned safely from his first voyage to India, and the second was started by King Joao I after defeating the Spanish in 1385. Both show off the Manueline style of decoration, with various fruits carved on columns as well as ropes and other features of naval architecture. Mosteiro de Batalha was built and re-decorated over a long period, hence the tributes to a king who reigned long after the building was started.

From Lisbon we spent a day in the town of Evora, half-way to the Spanish border. There we viewed a well-preserved Roman temple with 14 granite Corinthian columns and a church with tiled interior walls showing scenes from the life of the founder of the religious order which created the church. Since the introduction of tiles by the Moors, the technique of tiling and creating pictures with tiles has been enormously developed by the Portuguese. We saw tiles in many locations, including beautiful buildings in Lisbon and other places where the whole frontage was tiled.

Near Evora, we visited a double Neolithic stone circle on a peaceful hillside, and then a menhir, a single standing stone. These structures were a reminder that the area was populated around seven thousand years ago. Farther north, we visited Citania de Briteiros, the site of a fortified hill town with settlement from the Iron Age onwards. Again, the site had strategic views over the surrounding area.

On our way north from Lisbon to Porto we visited Coimbra and the historic campus of its university where we saw the examination hall and the old library which is now a museum. The examination hall was interesting, with a decorated wooden ceiling and many portraits of royalty and former rectors of the university. However, the library was incredibly beautiful, with bookcases decorated with gold leaf and ceilings covered in frescoes.

From Coimbra we visited the Roman site of Conimbriga where we saw the remains of a wonderful first century house with mosaic floors and where the fountains still worked!    

In Porto we visited Taylor’s port lodge, where we toured their excellent museum about the making of port and then sampled two kinds of port. On the last day, some of us took a wonderful cruise up the River Douro, although the boat did not go as far as the areas producing grapes for port.