Braga

A Baroque stair zigzags up to the hilltop church, with a fountain for each of the five senses on its landings. It became a World Heritage site in 2019, and many people ride the funicular up and walk the steps down.

Built in 1882, the funicular fills a tank on the upper car with water and lets that weight haul the lower car up. It still works the same way, and the two cars squeeze past each other at the midpoint.

Begun in the eleventh century, it is the oldest cathedral in Portugal. Apart from entering to pray, visitors buy tickets by route for the cathedral itself, the chapels including the Kings' Chapel where the parents of the first king lie, and the treasury.

A Marian shrine on a summit higher than Bom Jesus, counted as the country's largest pilgrimage site after Fatima. Stairs under the dome lead onto the roof, where Braga and the Minho farmland open out.

Box hedge patterns and flower beds sit beneath the walls and arches of the medieval archbishop's palace. The flowers are fullest in spring, and old town workers eat lunch on the benches along the palace wall.

An eighteenth century mansion with its whole front in blue tile and the windows framed in curving granite. Inside, a modest display covers the charity hospital, so many people look at the front and walk on.

A seventeenth century noble mansion, now a museum where the furniture and tableware stay in place. The Baroque garden at the back has fountains and a box maze, and many visitors spend longer there than in the house.

Once the mother house of the Benedictines in Portugal and Brazil, a 15 minute drive northwest of the centre. Hidden in the wooded hill behind is a Baroque water stair where a stream runs down the steps.

The stone village of an Iron Age Celtic people on a hilltop, with two round houses rebuilt as they once stood. Being on the summit, it has almost no shade.

Portugal's only national park, where a Roman road and its milestones survive among granite peaks and waterfalls. On summer weekends the car parks by the falls are full from the morning.

A Baroque triumphal arch of 1773 marking the historic centre's west entry, built with no doors at all. That is why Portuguese tease anyone who leaves a door open by asking if they are from Braga. Through it begins the pedestrian street to the cathedral.

A small 16th-century chapel built by the Coimbra family, with a crenellated Manueline tower. Inside, carved stone figures of Christ's Passion ring the altar. It is wedged into the central shopping streets, easy to drop into in passing.

A Roman shrine at a water source, with a human figure and inscriptions cut into the rock, dated to the 1st century. A modern building now roofs it over, and you gaze down from a sunken room. It survives from Braga's days as Roman Bracara Augusta.

Every Thursday a market fills the big square of Barcelos, west of Braga, with vegetables, poultry, pottery and wooden crafts. The souvenir rooster was born here, and stalls brim with them in all sizes. Mornings are busiest; packing up starts around noon.

Chartered in 1125, it is reckoned Portugal's oldest town. A long medieval stone bridge crosses the Lima on Roman foundations. Legend says Roman soldiers took the river for Lethe, the stream of forgetting, and feared to cross; statues by the bridge recall it.