Coimbra

A baroque hall of 1728 holding sixty thousand volumes on gilded shelves. Bats are let loose at night to take the insects, and the desks are covered in leather each morning.

Built in the twelfth century like a fort, with small windows and heavy walls. The cloister inside stays quiet, which makes it a place to catch your breath partway up the hill.

A garden carrying a fourteenth century story of a prince and a lady in waiting, with one spring of water named for it. The trees have grown tall enough to hold shade right through summer.

The university laid this out in 1772, and bamboo groves and glasshouses follow the slope. In exam season students take the lawns to study on.

The museum stands on a Roman gallery, so its lowest floor is a structure two thousand years old. One stair drops from the sculpture rooms above into that gallery.

Unlike the Lisbon form this is sung by men, who take the stage still wearing the student cape. The custom of answering with a cough instead of applause is kept.

Graduates have cut their names and lines into the stone of this hilltop garden for generations. The oldest plaques have worn past reading, and new ones go up beside them.

A Roman town twenty minutes away by road, where broad stretches of floor mosaic survive. The fountain garden has had its pipes restored and the water still rises.

A convent abandoned to the flooding river was dug back out of the silt. The floor sits below its old level, so the excavated column bases stand exposed.

A park of scaled buildings from 1940, put up across the country at the height of a child. The doorways are small enough that an adult has to fold to get inside.

The university inherited this hilltop royal palace, and UNESCO listed the courtyard and campus in 2013. The bell in the 18th-century clock tower, nicknamed the goat, once rang students home at curfew. With a ticket you can climb the tower above the Mondego.

Founded in 1131, this monastery church holds Portugal's first king, Afonso Henriques, and his son Sancho I, flanking the altar. Their tombs got new stone carving in the 16th century. Next door, Cafe Santa Cruz pours coffee beneath a former chapel's vaults.

The Jesuits' college church beside the university, which became the cathedral in 1772, years after the order's 1759 expulsion. Its smooth white Baroque front contrasts with the Romanesque Old Cathedral below. It is steps from the university courtyard.

The medieval gate leading from the Baixa shopping streets into the walled upper town. Almedina is Arabic for city, and a tower crowns the arch. Beyond it, a steep stepped lane called Quebra-Costas, the back-breaker, climbs to the Old Cathedral.

Floods kept swamping the riverside convent, so the nuns moved uphill on the south bank during the 17th century. The altar holds the silver and crystal coffin of Queen Saint Isabel. The stone tomb she ordered in life rests separately in the lower choir.

A museum in the chemistry laboratory built during the university's 18th-century reforms. Old lab apparatus, physics machines and natural history specimens are shown as the university collected them. Hands-on exhibits for children draw families.

Carmelite friars walled and tended this hilltop forest north of Coimbra from the 17th century. At its heart, a neo-Manueline palace built as a royal hunting lodge is now a hotel. A memorial on the ridge marks the 1810 Battle of Bussaco against Napoleon's army.