Is a haven for lovers of books, beer and beautiful beaches

MY tuk-tuk driver Jose revs up his three-wheel chariot and zooms off while I hold on tight.

We zip through the narrow streets of Nazare, a fishing town on Portugal’s Atlantic coast.

Bumping along cobbled streets, the tarpaulin roof flaps wildly in blustery winds sweeping in from the shore.

We pass whitewashed houses where elderly women sit outside in heavy black clothes, fanning their weatherbeaten faces in the harsh midday sun. “Look, you see? The fish!” Up ahead, Jose proudly points out lines of silvery mackerel pinned on to frames where they are left to dry out in the sun.

Seafood is the main staple in Nazare, a sleepy town on the coast of Portugal’s Centro region.

This beautiful area, halfway up the country and stretching from the Atlantic coast eastward to the border with Spain, has just got more accessible thanks to Monarch Airlines’ new routes to Lisbon from Manchester, JEFF FARRELL Birmingham and Gatwick. After a whistle-stop tour, Jose takes me to the town’s famous Sao Miguel fortress. It sits on a slither of a peninsula that pokes out into the sea.

Rusty cannons stand on wagon-style wheels and point out to the Atlantic. They date back to the late 1500s when Portugal feared an attack by the Dutch who were busy colonising the world.

But the big draw for me here is the view. Long sandy beaches stretch out, swirling sea rages wildly and waves crash back and forth amid a tumult of ferocious currents.

It’s this fizzing water that puts Nazare on the map. It is a surfing mecca where thrillseekers swoop in from all over the world to catch a few waves.

Later, I swap the tuk-tuk for a bike and take to the road. I ride out of Nazare, leaving the blustery wind for the shelter of a pine forest that fills my nostrils with a Christmassy smell.

After an hour or so, I leave flat ground and huff and puff up a hill that emerges back out on to the open coast. My next adventure is a trip inland to the medieval town of Obidos. This fortress town is tucked neatly into lush green hills and looks like something straight out of a fairytale book.

But where it was once a thriving walled city, these days its stock-in-trade is books and this unique theme is proving to be a hit with tourists.

I get my first taste when I check into my hotel, The Literary Man. The boutique-style inn has more than 40,000 titles stacked on shelves.

I run my fingers over dusty copies of highbrow volumes such as Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and flick through some of my favourite thrillers and crime reads such as The Shining.

Chatty hotel owner Telmo Faria explains why his inn and the town opened its bosom to books.

He says: “It is our niche and has worked to draw in the crowds.”

At the rustic-looking restaurant, I tuck into rounds of tapas including platters of local cheese and cold meats, mussels and fried prawns. I round the meal off with the local aperitif of gin, knocking it back and gobbling the chocolate “glass”.

My next stop is Batalha, another gem in the culturally-rich Centro region.

I meet the curator Joaquim Ruivo, who leads a tour of the town’s famous monastery. He tells me the gothic-style building was a hive of activity during Portugal’s colonial era when its empire stretched from East Timor to Brazil.

But it lay in ruins for hundreds of years after the country’s “golden” age ended.

City chiefs later opted to return it to its glory days in a 150-year project – what Joaquim calls a “short time” for a scheme of that size. However long it took, the monastery later earned the esteemed Unesco World Heritage site title.

But if culture’s not your bag, there are hundreds of miles of beaches and choppy seas where you can chill out or have fun in the water.

In Mafra I watched groups of people hitting the waves for surfing lessons.

I learned a long time ago that me and watersports are a bad mix, so slouching on a beanbag outside a beach bar, I order a cold Sagres lager and get stuck into a paperback.

Centro’s beaches, books and beers are what it’s all about for me.