After a leisurely morning with a home cooked (by me) breakfast, we said goodbye to Porto and drove east into the Duoro river valley to see how scenic is the region. People organize all sorts of river cruise to this region as wine tours. The weather started to break as the day progressed. There were numerous small towns dotting the small highways along both banks of the river but it wasn't as scenic as I expected.
We continued to drive north passing through Guimaraes when we saw the impressive medieval Castelo de Guimaraes which is built in the 10th century to defend against the Moors.
We reached our most northern point in Portugal at Braga in the afternoon and visited the UNESCO listed pilgrims church Bom Jesus do Monte. We didn't know how big and grand the site layout was until we started walking. We could have parked the car at the foot of the hill and walked up to the church along the beautifully laid out stairs (116m high). There are even two nice hotels on top of the hills for pilgrims (?) or tourists. The ground was clean and kept spotless. This present church was rebuilt in 1800s and the funicular onsite was the first one built in the whole Iberian Peninsula!
We then checked in to our most unique accommodation of the trip: a stay in the monastery Mosteiro de São Martinho de Tibães. In the middle of this well known monastery, they renovated it to include about 10 guestrooms which are very modernly designed and decorated. I felt we had the whole quiet monastery all to ourselves. As a bonus, we got free admission and audioguides to the monastery. There were not too many tourists around so we had a leisurely walk. As it's no longer an active monastery, we could walk about the sanctuary freely and even sit on the choir chairs! Just near the end of our tour, a big tour bus showed up and hordes of tourists rushed in, one hour before closing! Such is life for organized tours! So glad we decided to go it alone.
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