In which Sid and Doris visit Roman, Romanesque, and Gothic buildings but find little trace of the Moors.
In Coimbra we are staying at the Quinta das Lagrimas. It is now quite a large hotel complex centred around the family palace where we have chosen a room in the old building. We tour the gardens, where the Duke of Wellington added to the arboretum (while taking time off from the Peninsular Wars), the en-suite chapel and the library where Sid and Doris have set up adventure headquarters.
If Braga was Canterbury then Coimbra is Oxford with fine quadrangles, chapels and libraries. We pass on most of this favouring the Museu Nacional de Machado de Castro. This is built on a Roman cryptoporticum, the b-EST preserved Roman building in Portugal. It is a vast set of underpinnings for the town forum, to create a flat plaza out of a very steep slope, later built over to be a bishops’ palace and now a museum. Usually ex-Roman buildings formed handy pre-cut stone supply sources for local builders after the Romans left, but it seems that nobody was tempted to dismantle half of the hillside and the buildings on top of it to demolish this one.
Out of the cellars and up into the museum on top. In the fifteenth century the town attracted artists from Northern Europe and soon we have known the sculptural work of Jean de Rouen all our lives. We have had enough joy before the inexorable route through the Ikea-like maze is done. Staff helpfully make sure we do not miss the gold and silver but we are full. Not even a wafer thin crucifix, please.
There are many things to marvel out (see also Doris on some of the surprises) but do have a look at this treasury brought here from an abandoned nunnery and rebuilt in 1963. For scale the two figures just inside the big pillars on the bottom left are roughly human size. V&A plaster cast courts, eat your heart out.
There is evidence here that trig was pretty well understood but there was a bit of a panic that the youth of the day were not getting on with the STEM subjects and Portugal would be left behind. These tiles dating from early 18th century show how students were taught Euclid’s Elements.
Though we did see an Opel Kadett, a Renault 4 and a Peugeot 504 the bishops’ Berlin takes today’s conveyance of the day.
And while Sid marvelled at the only thing with wheels in the entire museum, Doris found this charming enamelled plaque. The whole thing is about 6″ tall, and it is worth zooming in to admire details such as the expression of the chap in dark tights.
Staying with our architectural theme our next visit is the Romanesque Old Cathedral. See the round arches and fortress style as the Moors were still a threat. And in the later-built cloisters here are the pointy Gothic arches with the sunlit tower artfully captured against a bank of rain-filled clouds.
We walk home along the banks of the Mondego past a clever rainbow-making water sculpture. Clouds come and go, and there is almost enough sunlight to make it work. Five minutes later when we are crossing the pedestrian bridge that takes us back to the hotel/ farmhouse/palace there is a blast of full sunshine but not for long enough to make it worth dashing back to the sculpture.
Casting something of a shadow are the emergency Covid Christmas/New Year regulations here in Portugal, gloomily announced to us by the hotel receptionist. From the 24th (tomorrow), to stay at a hotel or eat in a restaurant will require a Covid test no more than two days old. And btw the receptionist tells us none of the pharmacies in town have any availability and their Christmas bookings are all being cancelled.
Doris gets to work on the ordinateur to our Lisbon hotel and books us tests in their sister establishment nearby for the 24th and 26th December, which will just see us through our planned time in Portugal. Assuming we get a negative result.
Christmas Eve is the big night for fancy dinners in Portugal. So in case of problems tomorrow we decide to celebrate our Christmas Eve early with a fabulous dinner in the Quinta das Lagrimas. As you know S&D do not make a habit of taking photos of food, so the charming amuse-gueles, raviolis, soft-cooked egg, cod and immaculate lamb (Xmas joke) have long since vanished without track, but Sid’s dessert did deserve to be documented.