Country Roads of Portugal

Lisbon stretches beyond the window across steep hills, tiled façades and terracotta rooftops, with yellow trams climbing cobbled streets above the Tagus. As your complimentary transfer takes you from the airport to the hotel, you may notice blue-and-white azulejos patterning doorways and walls. After time to unpack, join your Travel Director for dinner at a local restaurant. Over good food and wine, you meet your fellow travellers, spending your first evening in Portugal with the people who will share the journey ahead.

With your Local Specialist, you’ll move along the broad avenues of Lisbon’s Lower Town, crossing squares where leaves stir overhead and patterned shadows fall across the pavement. In Belém, you’ll stand before the weathered stone of Belém Tower and the Monument to the Discoveries, both facing the waters once crossed by Portugal’s explorers. At Jerónimos Monastery, you’ll pass beneath the cloister’s carved arches, alongside slender columns and intricate stonework. Then, a warm Pastel de Belém from the patisserie flakes lightly onto your fingertips, its crisp shell giving way to smooth custard that has guarded its secret recipe for almost 200 years. This evening, you can continue your introduction to Portuguese culture over an Optional Experience dinner.

You'll cross the River Tagus and travel south to Lagos, where the pale sweep of Meia Praia curves around the bay and fishing boats rest near the harbour. With time to explore, you can follow the waterfront, pause by the harbour and listen to boats knock softly against their moorings before continuing to your hotel near the Algarve coast. At dinner, settle in for a meal of freshly caught seafood, tender and delicate on the palette.

Through Évora’s medieval walls, you'll follow whitewashed lanes towards cathedral towers and the aqueduct’s long stone arcades. Your Local Specialist guides you through this UNESCO World Heritage city to the Roman Temple, where granite columns topped with pale marble capitals have stood for almost two thousand years. Inside the 16th-century Capela dos Ossos, dim light falls across walls covered with thousands of human skulls and bones while at Évora Cathedral, your gaze travels from solid Romanesque masonry to pointed Gothic arches overhead. With the afternoon free, choose your own route through the historical centre or the city park, following the aqueduct as it continues within the old walls.

Above the Alentejo, Monsaraz crowns a hill ringed by olive groves and vineyards, its castle walls looking out towards Spain. From the ruins, you gaze across the dry plains beyond and the vast blue waters of Lake Alqueva below. On board with a local boat captain, the shoreline slips quietly past as he shares tales of life on the water. At Sem Fim, a local restaurant housed in a former olive mill, taste a generous selection of regional dishes. Back in Évora, the evening is yours to explore more of this beautifully preserved regional capital.

At Casa Relvas, native Portuguese grapes such as Touriga Nacional introduce you to the wines of the Alentejo, perhaps tasting their fruit, spice and warmth. During your MAKE TRAVEL MATTER® Experience, the family shares how innovative water-saving techniques help them care for the estate and continue producing wine in a region where every drop matters. From the deep ruby of the wine, you travel on to Fátima’s broad white sanctuary. You may cross the vast Prayer Area to the basilica or visit the Chapel of the Apparitions, built on the site associated with the Virgin Mary’s appearance to three young shepherds in 1917. Across central Portugal’s rolling hills, you'll arrive in Tomar for your choice experience. Inside the UNESCO-listed Convento do Cristo, enter the octagonal Templars’ Rotunda with a Local Specialist, where painted surfaces, polychrome stone and gilded woodwork cover the interior. Alternatively, join a Local Specialist inside Tomar’s medieval synagogue, where twelve graceful arches span the 15th-century prayer hall above four slender columns.

Following your Local Specialist through Coimbra’s Old Town, you'll reach the UNESCO-listed university and enter its magnificent Baroque library. Centuries-old books line two-storey shelves in rooms of deep red, green and black, beneath trompe-l’oeil ceilings and carved balconies. Beyond Coimbra, the Douro curves below steep terraces, each row of vines following the contours of the hills towards the water. Sit down to a Farm-to-Table lunch prepared with locally sourced ingredients, followed by a Port tasting, the fortified wine’s rich sweetness lingering on the palate.

With northern Portugal’s mountain ranges beyond the window, you arrive in Guimarães, where you look out from the castle’s granite battlements across the city known as Portugal’s birthplace. In the old town, you'll follow stone-paved lanes into medieval squares, passing granite arcades and balconies dressed in flowers. You'll continue to Porto and its UNESCO-listed historic centre beside the Douro. Inside São Bento Railway Station, your Local Specialist introduces you to twenty thousand hand-painted tiles that sprawl across the entrance hall. As you cross the Dom Luís I Bridge, you look through its sweeping iron lattice to the river far below and the old city lining the slopes. On an Optional Experience, pass Ribeira’s pastel-hued houses before boarding a traditional Rabelo boat, once used to transport barrels of Port along the Douro. The wooden boat slips beneath Porto’s bridges before you'll sit down to traditional Portuguese dishes at a riverside restaurant.

With the day entirely yours, you can roam Porto at your own pace, passing rows of Multi-coloured houses and churches dressed in glazed blue-and-white tiles. Perhaps you stop before the painted scenes, study the carved stone around old doorways and choose whichever narrow street tempts you next. Alternatively, join an Optional Experience to Braga, Portugal’s Baroque capital, where sculpted stonework curls around grand entrances and gilded interiors shimmer with 17th- and 18th-century ornament.

Passing through Óbidos’s medieval gateway, you'll enter a maze of narrow lanes in a town presented by King Dinis to Queen Isabel in the 13th century. Chalk-white houses edged in blue and yellow line the cobbles, with flowers spilling from balconies and honeysuckle climbing old walls. You'll follow the lanes past carved Manueline doorways and small squares towards the castle keep beyond the terracotta roofs. Back in Lisbon, you'll join your Travel Director and fellow travellers for dinner. Around the table, you raise a glass with companions who began the journey as strangers.

After breakfast, your transfer takes you to Lisbon International Airport.