What to visit in Portugal ?

Portugal runs at its own rhythm. Lisbonites eat dinner past 9pm, the villages of the Alentejo close between noon and 3pm without exception, and no one apologises for it. It's a country where saudade isn't a tourism concept but a real way of inhabiting time - audible in a fado drifting from an Alfama lane on a weekday evening, with no intended audience.

The territory reads as vertical bands. The Minho in the north is green and damp, cut out for vinho verde and the markets of Viana do Castelo. The centre holds Coimbra with its black-caped students and the scorched pine forests of the Serra da Lousã. The Algarve in the south is split between ochre sandstone cliffs at Sagres and overloaded resorts in Albufeira. Between the two, the Alentejo stretches across plains of cork oak and wheat, with Évora as its anchor.