Old world charm in Coimbra, Portugal
Coimbra boasts a vibrant market and a splendid Baroque library
A couple of hours north of Lisbon, Coimbra is the Oxford or Cambridge of Portugal — the home of its most venerable university.
It’s also the country’s easiest-to-enjoy city — a miniLisbon, with everything good about urban Portugal without the intensity of a big metropolis.
One of the best activities in Coimbra is wandering the inviting, Arab-flavoured old town — a maze of narrow streets, time-worn shops, and tiny tascas (budget eateries). A pedestrian street divides the lower part of the old town (Baixa) from the upper (Alta).
Historically, only the rich could afford to live within the protective city walls of the Alta. Even today, the Baixa remains a poorer section, with haggard women rolling wheeled shopping carts, children running barefoot, and men lounging on squares as if wasting time were their life’s calling.
One of my favourite oldtown stops is the Mercado Municipal. Though nearly every city in Europe has a vibrant market, in many cases, the character has been lost thanks to the European Union asserting itself and raising hygiene standards.
But in Coimbra, the colour and twinkle survive. Visitors can still feel the wrinkled and fragrant pulse of the town and see the “salt of the earth” in the faces of the women selling produce while their men are off in the fields — or in their beloved “little chapels” (a.k.a. bars).
To find the market’s seafood section, all you have to do is follow your nose.
While fresh seafood is abundant, the Portuguese favour bacalhau — dried and salted cod. Perhaps it’s in their collective DNA, from the age when preserved-in-salt cod was the life-sustaining protein sailors filled the holds of their ships with.
Even though cod is no longer found in nearby waters, the Portuguese remain the world’s biggest cod eaters, importing dried and salted cod from Norway, stacking it like wood, and — when it’s time to eat it — soaking it and cooking it.
When touring any city, it’s fun to drop in on the local university. Coimbra’s is beautifully situated on a hill, overlooking the city.
To get there, you can follow the little lanes that meander up like the alleyways of a Moroccan medina, or ride an elevator halfway up the long, steep hill, then transfer to a funicular.
The university’s highlight is one of Europe’s best surviving Baroque libraries, displaying 55,000 books in 18thcentury splendour.
The zealous doorkeeper locks the door at every opportunity to keep out humidity, so you need to buzz to get into this 300-year-old temple of thought.
Theresidentbats—wholive in the building, but not the library itself — are well cared for and appreciated. They eat insects,providingachemicalfree way of protecting the books, and alert the guard to changing weather with their “eee-eee” cry.
Before heading back down into the heart of Coimbra, it’s worth visiting the Machado de Castro Museum. Housed in an elegant old bishop’s palace, it boasts many floors of mostly religious 14th- to 16th-century art.
All of this sits upon the vast, barren understructure of an ancient Roman forum, which is also open to visitors.
After a day of wandering, cap it off with some fado, the folk music of Portugal. Though fado is generally performed by women, in Coimbra, men sing the fado.
You can watch fado at various clubs, or you may stumble upon roving bands of students, dressed in their signature black capes and serenading around town for tips — and the hearts of women.