Guimarães and the county that became a country

On the walls of Guimarães Castle, a stone inscription reads "Aqui nasceu Portugal": here Portugal was born. It refers to Afonso Henriques, generally reckoned to have been born in or near the castle in the early twelfth century, who grew up to lead the County of Portugal in rebellion against the neighbouring Kingdom of León, won recognition as an independent king after the Battle of São Mamede in 1128, and eventually had that independence confirmed by the pope in 1179. A county on the edge of somebody else's kingdom became a country in its own right within a single lifetime, and the castle where it more or less began still stands, largely unaltered, on its hill above the old town.

Guimarães itself, the medieval settlement that grew up in the castle's shadow, is one of the best-preserved historic centres in Portugal, its narrow granite streets and merchants' houses intact enough that UNESCO listed the whole town, not merely the castle, as a World Heritage Site in 2001. It rewards slow walking rather than a checklist of monuments; much of what makes it worthwhile is simply the fabric of the streets themselves.

Braga: the archbishops' city, and a staircase built for pilgrims

Twenty minutes north, Braga has been an important settlement for longer still, founded by the Romans as Bracara Augusta and later established as the seat of Portugal's senior archbishop, a status it has held, on and off, for the best part of a thousand years. Its best-known monument sits just outside the city: the Bom Jesus do Monte sanctuary, reached by a Baroque staircase that climbs the hillside in switchbacks, each landing marked with a fountain or a chapel representing a station of the cross. Pilgrims traditionally climbed it on their knees; most visitors today take the funicular, one of the oldest of its kind in the world, which has been hauling passengers up the same slope since 1882.

Coimbra, and a library that keeps its own guards

Further south again, Coimbra was Portugal's capital for part of the medieval period and remains home to one of Europe's oldest universities, founded in 1290 and still teaching on the same hilltop site, a status that earned the university and its surrounding old town a UNESCO listing of their own in 2013. Its showpiece is the Joanina Library, an eighteenth-century Baroque hall of gilded shelving that holds, among the more conventional security measures, a colony of small bats that live behind the bookcases and are let out at night to eat the insects that would otherwise damage the collection. The staff cover the furniture before dark and clean up after; the bats have been doing the actual work of pest control, by most accounts, for longer than anyone currently employed there has been alive.

Seeing all three without a hire car

Guimarães, Braga and Coimbra sit close enough together, and close enough to Porto, that an escorted tour can cover all three without much time lost to driving. Just You's ten-night tour spends time in Porto before continuing to Guimarães and Coimbra, then crosses south for New Year on the Lisbon coast, a route that effectively runs the country's history in order: the medieval north first, the Age of Discovery's Lisbon second.

Most visitors to Portugal see Lisbon, and increasingly Porto, and stop there. The country these three towns describe, the one that had to win its independence and then defend a university and an archbishopric to prove it meant to keep it, is easy to miss if the itinerary never leaves the coast.

None of the three requires much walking between sights, either; Guimarães, Braga and Coimbra were all built compactly, on hills chosen for defence rather than convenience, and the older centres are small enough to cross on foot between one landmark and the next. That is, in its own way, as honest a piece of medieval town planning as the castle inscription itself.