The Silver Coast, Óbidos, Nazaré and Peniche

The Costa de Prata, the Silver Coast, is the stretch of Portugal's Atlantic shore between Lisbon and Porto, and most visitors drive straight past it on the motorway. That is their loss. It is a coast of long, pale beaches and rolling surf, pine woods and lagoons, with fishing towns and old walled hill towns a little way inland, and the light off the sea gives it its name. It is quieter than the Algarve and wilder, and its three best-known places have plenty of history and drama between them.

Óbidos, the queen's town

Óbidos sits on a ridge a few miles inland, a small white town entirely enclosed by medieval walls, with a castle at one end. Inside, cobbled lanes run between whitewashed houses trimmed in blue and yellow, with bougainvillea over the doorways and window boxes at every turn. It is the very picture of a Portuguese hill town, and it knows it.

Its story is romantic. In 1282 King Dinis gave the town to his bride, Queen Isabel, as a wedding present, and for centuries afterwards it belonged to Portugal's queens. You can walk most of the way round the top of its walls, with no railing and a long drop on the outer side, looking down into the lanes and gardens on one side and over the countryside on the other.

Óbidos's speciality is ginjinha, a sweet cherry liqueur, served in tiny cups made of chocolate, which you drink and then eat. The town also takes books seriously: it has made itself a literary town, with bookshops in an old church and a market hall.

Nazaré and the giant waves

Nazaré, up the coast, has two faces. Down below is the fishing town, a long crescent beach backed by a promenade, where fishermen's wives were traditionally said to wear seven petticoats and some older women still wear traditional dress. Up on the cliff above, reached by a funicular, is the old quarter of Sítio, with a church and a view along the whole beach.

But Nazaré is known around the world now for something else. Just north of the town, off the beach called Praia do Norte, a deep underwater canyon runs almost to the shore, and it focuses the winter Atlantic swells into waves of extraordinary size. In 2011 the American surfer Garrett McNamara rode a wave here that was recognised as the biggest ever surfed at the time, and since then the big-wave surfers of the world have come each winter. On the right day, from the lighthouse on the headland, you can watch them towed by jet-skis onto walls of water as tall as a building.

Peniche and the Berlengas

Peniche, further south, stands on a peninsula that was once an island, a fishing port and a surfing town with a great sixteenth-century fortress at its tip. The fortress has a sombre history: under the Salazar dictatorship it was a prison for political opponents, and in 1960 the Communist leader Álvaro Cunhal and a group of fellow prisoners escaped from it. It is now a museum of the resistance.

Offshore lie the Berlengas, a small archipelago of granite islands that is a nature reserve, home to seabirds and with clear water, reached in summer by boat from Peniche.

Holidays that go there

Explore's seven-night Cycling Portugal - Porto to Lisbon rides down the coast through the heart of the Silver Coast: its places include Porto, Aveiro, Costa Nova and Praia de Mira, then Nazaré, São Martinho do Porto, Foz de Arelho, Óbidos and Peniche, before Lisbon. It departs in April, May, June, August, September and October.

Just You's four-night New Year on the Lisbon Coast, for solo travellers, sees the year in near Lisbon, with Ericeira, Sintra, Cabo da Roca, Lisbon and Óbidos among its places.

Explore's seven-night Highlights of Portugal travels between Lisbon and Porto, by way of Sintra and Belém, the great monasteries of Alcobaça and Batalha, Coimbra, Lamego and Peso da Régua in the Douro valley. It departs in April, May, June, July, August, September and October.

If you have a choice of season, the summer suits the beaches and the islands, but the big waves at Nazaré come in winter, roughly from October to March. Óbidos is lovely in any month, and quieter out of high season.