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My particular highlights of this town were the seven skirts grandmas who have spent all their lives seated waiting for the fish their husbands caught to dry at the downtown beach, and whose legs can tell stories right away, and a busting indoor fishing market that could put any chain supermarket to shame.
Last year we visited this town on our way back from the capital, where I shot a short video guide of Lisbon for Iberia Airlines. And now I understand that, that brief stop in Nazare in order to grab some lunch back then, was not enough to admire all the beauty of this coastal center of Portugal town.
COIMBRA was next. Leaving the coast behind, we arrived to the always young city right on time for dinner.
Right on time to wait for dinner outside. A hole in the wall, Ze Manel dos Ossos, truly deserved the long wait – when we were drinking beer on the street, worry not, we know how to spend 1 hour – before our table was ready.
Of course, no visit to this town could be completed without having a peak to the university life. Although I’m already on my thirties, I did enjoy some parties there in the past. The well known Queima das Fitas back in 2009 where I had an absolute blast left me craving for more.
Luckily, the Academic Association happened to celebrate its Festuna. A very different take on Coimbra’s night, where the open air stages filled with hype, color and loads of cerveja to celebrate the end of the Academic Year are changed for a proper theatre and a quiet and emotive event. There, some tunas aka ‘traditional university bands where only men dressed with a black cape take part’ played their hits facing an attentive audience before everybody ended up in the garden the Association has drinking more cerveja of course.
