Aveiro and its lagoon, the Portuguese town of canals

Aveiro is the kind of town that gets a nickname whether it wants one or not. It is often called the Venice of Portugal, which is unfair to both places but not hard to understand. Canals run into the centre from a great shallow lagoon, the Ria de Aveiro, and on them float long, high-prowed boats painted in bright colours, the moliceiros. The comparison ends there. Aveiro is a working Portuguese town of the coast, low and flat and full of light, and its water was for most of its history a place of labour rather than of gondolas.

The lagoon is the reason for everything. It lies behind a long bar of dunes, between the town and the Atlantic, and its channels, marshes and mudflats spread north and south along the coast. For centuries the people of the Ria made their living from what it gave them: fish, salt and weed.

Boats made for weed

The moliceiro takes its name from the moliço, an aquatic plant that grew in the lagoon and that farmers gathered to spread on their fields as fertiliser. The boats were designed locally in the nineteenth century for exactly that work, long and shallow enough to work the flats, with a high curling prow. Their sides are painted in bright panels of pictures and lettering, and no two boats are quite alike.

The harvest of moliço has dwindled almost to nothing, and the boats have found a second career carrying visitors along the canals of the town. It is a pleasant way to spend the better part of an hour: under the low bridges, past the old warehouses and the façades along the water, and out to where the canals open onto the salt flats. A good many of those façades are worth looking at in their own right. Aveiro has a fine collection of Art Nouveau buildings, with tiled fronts, ironwork and carved stone, and one of them houses a museum devoted to the style, the Museu de Arte Nova.

Salt, sweets and striped houses

Salt has been made on the Ria for centuries, and the pans on the edge of the town are still worked. They are flat, geometric and quiet, rectangles of shallow water reflecting the sky, with white heaps of salt drying beside them in summer. They make an odd and handsome foreground to a town, and they are a reminder that the lagoon was always as much a factory floor as a view.

Aveiro's other famous product is sweeter. Ovos moles, "soft eggs", are made from egg yolks and sugar, a rich golden paste. They have protected geographical status, which means the real thing comes from here, and you will see them in every pastry shop in the centre. One is delicious. Three in a row is a decision you will reflect on.

Across the lagoon, on the strip of sand between the Ria and the sea, is Costa Nova, whose striped houses draw every camera in town. They are palheiros, wooden buildings first put up in the nineteenth century to store fishing gear and to shelter the crews in the season, later turned into family homes. They are painted in bold vertical or horizontal stripes, red and white, blue and white, green and yellow, and a row of them facing the water looks like a beach hut parade drawn by a child with excellent taste. Similar rows once stood elsewhere along the coast and were pulled down for modern houses; Costa Nova kept its own.

North of the mouth of the lagoon, on the long spit of São Jacinto, is a nature reserve of dunes, pinewood and marsh, protected since 1979. Its ponds and shores draw sea and marsh birds, especially at the migration seasons, and it is a quieter, wilder face of the same landscape.

Holidays that stop at Aveiro

Aveiro lies on the coast south of Porto, on the way for anyone travelling down the length of the country, and two holidays in the catalogue stop there.

Explore Worldwide's seven-night Cycling Portugal – Porto to Lisbon is the one that takes the lagoon most seriously. Among its places are Furadouro, São Jacinto, Aveiro and Costa Nova, before it carries on to Praia de Mira, Nazaré, São Martinho do Porto, Foz de Arelho, Óbidos and Peniche on the way to Lisbon. It has departures in April, May, June, August, September and October.

Just You's seven-night Picturesque Portugal is a broader tour of the north and centre of the country. Its places include Porto, the Douro Valley and Pinhão, Guimarães and Vila Real, Aveiro and Coimbra, and then Lisbon, Sintra, Cascais, Estoril and Óbidos.

A day in Aveiro needs very little planning. Take a boat along the canals, walk out to the salt pans, buy a box of ovos moles for later, and if there is time, cross to Costa Nova for the stripes and the sea. The lagoon will do the rest.