Coimbra's university hill: a self-guided walk

By Alleytale

From a botanical garden to a Romanesque cathedral on the Alta

Almost everything on this hill was given a second life: a royal palace became a university, a Jesuit church became a cathedral, and a bishop's palace became a museum above a Roman forum.

Coming soonApp StoreComing soonGoogle Play

The stops

1. 1Botanical Garden of the University of Coimbra

   The Marquis of Pombal founded this garden in 1772, on part of the farm of the São Bento college. It covers 13 hectares, with formal terraces at the top of a valley and a wooded arboretum below, where you will find a bamboo forest and 51 species of eucalyptus. Squirrels have lived here since six pairs were introduced in June 1994.

   

2. 2Science Museum of the University of Coimbra

   The museum brings together the university's historical science collections: the physics instruments of the 18th and 19th centuries, natural history collections of botany, zoology, anthropology and mineralogy, and the collections of the Astronomical Observatory and the Geophysical Institute. Most of them go back to the university reform of 1772 under the Marquis of Pombal, when the teaching of science became of major importance, and they sit in 18th-century buildings. Several separate university museums were merged into this one in 2006 and 2007.

   

3. 3Sé Nova

   This was first the church of the Jesuit college founded in Coimbra in 1543. After the Jesuits were banned from Portugal in 1759, the bishop's seat moved here from the old cathedral in 1772. The lower part of the façade is strictly Mannerist and the upper part, finished in the early 18th century, is Baroque, and the façade of the cathedral in Salvador, Brazil, seems to have been inspired by this one.

   

4. 4Machado de Castro National Museum

   The museum fills the former Bishop's Palace, which stands roughly where the Roman forum of Aeminium once was, and the forum's cryptoporticus can be visited on the lower floors. The museum first opened in 1913, and a renovation between 2004 and 2012 that added a new building won the Piranesi/Prix de Rome Prize in 2014. Its sculpture collection is the most extensive of all the national museums of Portugal.

   

5. 5Paço das Escolas

   Before it was a university this was a royal palace: the Alcáçova was built at the end of the 10th century, and from 1131 King Afonso Henriques lived here, in the country's first royal palace. The university moved in during the 16th century and bought the palace in 1597. Look for the Porta Férrea, a triumphal arch of 1634 with statues of King Dinis and King João III, and the university tower, built between 1728 and 1733, whose bell facing the river is known as the cabra, the goat.

   

6. 6Biblioteca Joanina

   King John V began this baroque library in 1717 and it was finished by 1728, though it received its first books only in 1750. Its walls are about 2.11 metres thick, and a teak door helps keep the air at 18 to 20 degrees. Its books are guarded from insects by a colony of bats, as in the library of the Mafra palace, and each night workers cover the tables with leather sheets.

   

7. 7Sé Velha

   Building began some time after the Battle of Ourique in 1139, when Afonso Henriques chose Coimbra as his capital, and from outside the cathedral looks like a small fortress. Sancho I, the second king of Portugal, was crowned here in 1185. It is described as the only Portuguese Romanesque cathedral of the Reconquista era to survive relatively intact, and inside you can look for its roughly 380 carved capitals, which show plants, geometric patterns and animals but almost no people.

   

Hear the full story as you walk, or create your own walk, in the Alleytale app.