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Portugal

6 city guides · Europe

Cities in Portugal (6)

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🇵🇹 Portugal

Coimbra

Coimbra (population 105,000 city, 460,000 metropolitan area — the most important university city in Portugal and the third-largest city in the country) is the most historically significant city in Portugal after Lisbon: the ancient capital of Portugal (from 1131 to 1255 CE — the period when Coimbra was the royal seat of the first four Portuguese kings and the political center of the nascent Portuguese kingdom during its most important formative period) and home to the oldest university in the Portuguese-speaking world (the University of Coimbra — founded 1290, UNESCO World Heritage Site 2013: the most important single institution in the history of Portuguese intellectual life). The Joanina Library (the most beautiful Baroque library in the world — built 1717–1728 with the most elaborate and the most dramatically decorated book chambers in any library in Europe) and the Old Cathedral (the most important Romanesque church in Portugal: the Sé Velha of Coimbra (1182 CE) is the most perfectly preserved Romanesque cathedral on the Iberian Peninsula). The Coimbra fado (the most important regional variant of the Portuguese fado: the "fado de Coimbra" (the most noble and the most formally dressed fado tradition in Portugal — the male students and graduates in the black academic capes who perform the most melancholic and the most poetically sophisticated fado tradition in the country) is the most internationally respected regional fado outside Lisbon.

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Faro

Faro (population 70,000) is the capital of the Algarve region and the most historically layered single Portuguese city in the southernmost province — the gateway to 200km of the most dramatically golden-cliff-and-sea-cave single European Atlantic coastline. The Old Town (Cidade Velha — the most completely Roman-and-Moorish-and-Portuguese-wall-layered single Algarve historic quarter), the Ria Formosa Natural Park (the most biologically diverse single Portuguese coastal lagoon: the most extensive single barrier island lagoon system in the western Iberian Peninsula — 60km of lagoon separating the coast from the Atlantic, the most flamingo-populated single Portuguese wetland), the Faro Cathedral (the most impressive single Algarve religious monument with the most panoramic single bell tower view of the lagoon and coast), and the Ossos Chapel (the most dramatically bone-decorated single Portuguese funerary chapel — similar in concept to the Évora bone chapel). Most visitors fly through Faro Airport (FAO — the most Algarve-visitor single entry point) without stopping, making Faro the most underrated and the most authentically Portuguese single Algarve city.

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🇵🇹 Portugal

Funchal

Funchal is the capital of Madeira — a Portuguese island 520km west of Morocco in the Atlantic, and a city of 105,000 people in a natural amphitheatre of green volcanic hills rising directly from a crescent harbour where cruise ships moor in a line at the renovated dockside. Madeira is not the Canary Islands: the island is steep (over 1,800m in 60km), densely forested (laurisilva — laurel forest listed as UNESCO Natural Heritage 2000, a Tertiary-period ecosystem that covered most of southern Europe 15 million years ago and survives only here and in small patches in the Canaries and the Azores), cooled year-round by the Atlantic trade winds, and never hot in the tropical sense (annual average temperature in Funchal: 22°C). The city is famous for: the Mercado dos Lavradores (the art nouveau market where tropical fruits — cherimoya, pitanga, banana-passionfruit, tamarillo — are sold by women in traditional Madeira dress), Blandy's Wine Lodge (a 17th-century wine lodge in the city centre producing Madeira wine — the fortified wine that lasts centuries in a bottle and was the most important wine in the 18th-century British and American worlds), the Monte toboggan ride (a wicker sledge ridden by two men in straw hats down 2km of cobblestone), and the Levada walks (300km of stone irrigation channels through the laurel forest, now the best hiking network in the Atlantic islands). Best months: April–June and September–October.

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Lisbon

Lisbon (Lisboa) is Europe's westernmost capital and its most romantic — a city of seven hills above the mouth of the Tagus River, where Moorish castles and Manuelino monasteries overlook a labyrinth of fado-filled alleyways (the Alfama), the world's most nostalgic tram network, and the melancholy beauty of a country that once ruled an empire spanning four continents. Portugal's Age of Discovery (15th-16th centuries) left Lisbon with the Jerónimos Monastery (the finest example of Manueline architecture in the world), the Tower of Belém, and the Discoveries Monument — and a cultural mix (Moorish, African, Brazilian, Indian) that makes Lisbon unlike any other European capital. The city has been Europe's most fashionable destination since around 2015 — and the affordable wine, custard tarts and the plaintive beauty of fado music explain why.

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Porto

Porto (population 237,000 in the city, 1.7 million in the Porto Metropolitan Area — the second largest city of Portugal and the city that gave Portugal its name (Portus Cale — the Roman name for the port on the Douro River mouth, from which "Portugal" derives)) is built on granite hills dropping steeply to the Douro River, creating one of the most dramatically beautiful urban landscapes in Europe: the Ribeira district (the UNESCO World Heritage medieval waterfront with its stacked, azulejo-tiled townhouses), the Porto wine lodges of Vila Nova de Gaia on the south bank (the caves where the tawny and ruby Port wines age in oak barrels for 10, 20, 30 and 40 years), and the bridges over the Douro (the Ponte Dom Luís I (1886, Gustave Eiffel's colleague Théophile Seyrig — with a double-decker iron arch that carries road traffic on the lower level and the Metro on the upper level). Porto is also the home of one of the world's great bookshops (Livraria Lello — the 1906 neo-Gothic bookshop with the carved wooden staircase said to have inspired J.K. Rowling's Hogwarts), the birthplace of the francesinha (the Porto sandwich: bread, ham, fresh sausage, steak and linguiça, covered in melted cheese and drowned in a thick spiced tomato-and-beer sauce — the most extreme and distinctly Portuguese sandwich in existence), and the center of the most distinctive tile art tradition in Europe (the azulejos — the hand-painted tin-glazed ceramic tiles covering the facades of churches, stations and houses in Porto in a uniquely northern Portuguese way).

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Sintra

Sintra is a town of 18,000 inhabitants in the Serra de Sintra hills 25 km northwest of Lisbon — the UNESCO World Heritage "Cultural Landscape of Sintra" (designated 1995, covering the town, the palaces, the parks and the surrounding natural area) that the 19th-century Romantic movement turned into the most concentrated collection of fantasy palace architecture in Europe. Sintra was the Portuguese royal summer residence from the 8th century (the Moorish occupation) through the 20th century, and the clifftop and hilltop estates above the town became the site of an extraordinary experiment in Romantic architecture: aristocrats and monarchs competing to build the most spectacular, eclectic and fantastical palace or garden in the forested hills. The result is a collection of palaces and gardens without parallel in Europe: the Pena Palace (1842-1854 — the polychrome Romantic fairy-tale palace of King Ferdinand II of Portugal, built on the ruins of a Hieronymite monastery on the highest peak of the Serra, combining Manueline Gothic, Moorish, Renaissance and Baroque elements in a completely invented style coloured in deep yellow and red-terracotta; the most photographed building in Portugal); the Sintra National Palace (the Paço Real — the only surviving medieval royal palace in Portugal, with the extraordinary conical twin chimneys that rise 33 m from the kitchen and define the Sintra town skyline; the palace has been a royal residence since the Moorish period); the Quinta da Regaleira (the 1904-1910 estate of the millionaire António Augusto Carvalho Monteiro, designed by the Italian architect Luigi Manini with a Gothic-Manueline-Masonic aesthetic; the Initiation Well is the most extraordinary architectural feature — a spiralling underground tower descending 27 m with nine landings representing the nine circles of Hell in Dante's Inferno, accessible from the bottom via a subterranean tunnel); and the Moorish Castle (the 8th-10th century Islamic fortification on the Serra ridge, with the ramparts visible from the Pena Palace) and the Monserrate Palace (the orientalist fantasy palace of the English collector Sir Francis Cook, 1858-1869, with the Moorish dome, the Gothic arches and the Indian pavilion combined in the most eclectic single building in Sintra).

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