Saturday, 11 June
Today we were taken from the oldest university in Spain to the oldest in Portugal. The journey is a long one, about five hours by bus. We joined the vehicle quite late into its trajectory, coming from somewhere with a French-sounding (?) name which I can’t remember. The bus smelled faintly of sweat. It was somewhat full.
We passed through many different shades of orange soil, dotted with the now-familiar broom flowers. In late morning, we stopped in an exhilaratingly bleak service station dedicated to coaches and trucks. The place sat opposite a big ‘iberico jamon direct’ shop. In such a roadside location in the UK, you would buy lawnmowers. The service station itself was even weirder. One wasn’t allowed to eat one’s own food inside, so we had to perch on some pavement and share lunch with the ants. There was a kind of supermarket full of knick-knacks and legs of jamón for those that had forgotten to buy Spanish gifts (we were near the Portuguese border now). It also had an utterly surreal display of giant Playmobil figurines standing over shelves of guns. Although they were actually BB guns on closer inspection, they were pretty realistic and made a menacing sight with the dead eyes of the plastic statues.
Our pre-prepared lunch consisted of a package of lomo, cured pork loin, in translucent circular slices. The flavour was subtly different to normal jamón because of the addition of a little spice, probably pimenton. We also had massive Sicilian olives. These had to be held and bitten into like an apple.
We continued on our way and passed the Parque Natural de Serra Estrela, a mountain range. Everything seemed hillier in Portugal, at least where we had entered the country.
Eventually we arrived in Coimbra, at one end of a narrow street leading into the centre. We found a superbly cheap restaurant to have a lunch of horse mackerel in ‘Spanish’ sauce, salad and potatoes. We also had a ridiculous amount of red wine for €1.90 in total. The non-porcine, fish-based, green-decorated, non-tapas sized nature of the meal was a welcome change by this point. Also, the bread we were given was actively delicious – pillowy, even. It compared favourably to Spanish pan e coperto bread which is basically hardtack in a deceptive loaf shape. I tried the eye of the mackerel out of curiosity. It was subtle in flavour and rather delicate, with a tougher bit where it attached to the socket. The only bit which was unpalatable in my view was the hard white sphere which I assume was the pupil.
We were relatively casual in Coimbra on this day compared to our museum-blitzing in Léon and Salamanca. The university in Coimbra is a compelling mixture of Manueline gothic, baroque, and some slightly concerning if impressive riffs on Italian Fascist architecture. This place has barely a fraction of the medieval material that Salamanca boasts. This is not surprising when you dig deeper and discover that the university only settled here properly in the early 16th century, what most scholars would consider too late for the Middle Ages. Nevertheless the city’s street plan is a ghost of this period, with densely packed buildings arranged according to the steep hills’ topography.
In the late afternoon, we had some gelato in imaginative flavours: avocado and lime and almond for me( mazagran (an Algerian alcoholic coffee drink popular in Portugal) and sage for Bea. All of these were great successes (whether that surprises our readers or not).
After a little more exploring, we finished the day in a side alley near Sofia Street, where all the former university colleges are. Unlike Oxbridge, Coimbra’s collegiate system was shattered in the 19th century by a civil war which outlawed religious institutions of this type. Today the colleges sit empty and in a sad state of repair (some chapels have become cafés and shopping centers), but the university intends to reclaim some of them soon.
Back to the side alley: Bea had the idea of a burger (not a particularly typical local dish, but sometimes a change is welcome). We got the ‘student menu’ burgers (a touch disingenuously) at a place slightly off the beaten path. They came with four sauces, all of which were unexpected. The spicy mayo, though hardly spicy, was the most innocuous. Then, there was a yellow, turmeric-flavoured ‘mustard’ one which Bea identified as being very similar to Coronation Chicken, a typically English bastardisation of curry. There was a green sauce, like Grüne Soße but with tarragon as the main flavour and hardly any salt. Finally, there was a mystery ‘garlic’ aioli which tasted of nothing but sweetness. These were surely unexpected finds in a fast food joint. The burgers and chips were good too. Very small drinks came with the menu – a radically awful cider from Ireland for Bea and an anonymous lager (the Sagres brand which is ubiquitous here) for Alfie.
Next we had a vertiginous nighttime walk home. The air lay heavy with humidity and bougainvilleas. Thank goodness our ‘Alojamente Local’ (B&B) had a fan!
– Alfie