Portugal’s status as an agreeable member of the European minor league runs contrary to her huge place in world history and impressive mediaeval antecedents. The nascent country’s advance against the Moors in the Iberian far west and then its courageous self-defence against the might of a neighbouring Castile revealed a nation that would be perpetually in arms and perpetually in thrall to the Christian cause, however interpreted. Sea discovery and empire, with its ensuing riches, gold and slave trade, followed logically. The groundwork for all of this is visible to the eye in central Portugal.

Here, our concern is with the land stretching onwards from the Douro to the Tagus, hilly and tightly bunched by the western seaboard then stretching out into the broad and exhilarating sweeps of the Alentejo in the east; wheat and cork oak country of deep rusticity.

The first king of an independent Portugal pushed down through this land and endowed it in glorious style. It was King Afonso Henriques himself, in celebration of the capture from the Moors of Santarém, a key town on the Tagus, in 1147, who brought in the Cistercians to build the sensational ‘pure’ Gothic abbey of Alcobaça.

On August 14, 1385, with the aid of English archers, João I, first king of the new House of Avis, defeated the Castilians so heavily in central Portugal that this particular threat was over for a while. Close to the battlefield, João established another thrilling monastery, Batalha, or Battle – a cry of triumph.

Here João is buried with Philippa of Lancaster, his wife. She bore him five sons, all also buried here. This extraordinary brood were to carry Portugal to the threshold of the modern. One of them was Prince Henry the Navigator whose ambitions set in motion the exploration of the African coast and which led in turn, less than a century later, to Vasco da Gama’s arrival in India. Imperial wealth flowed into Portugal at the start of the sixteenth century. Under the royal beneficiary, Manuel the Fortunate, there developed the hyper-decorative style now known as ‘Manueline’ Gothic architecture. Batalha abbey is fourteenth/fifteenth-century ‘pure’ Gothic, massively decorated with sixteenth century Manueline pinnacles and every imaginable foible stone could be worked into. All so far, symbolically speaking, is concentrated here.

There came, of course, in 1580, the evil hour in which Castile finally did accomplish a takeover of Portugal. Two generations later it was yet another new dynasty, the House of Braganza, which won back independence. The Braganza family palace is in the Alentejo and we visit it on this trip. We go to Coimbra, too, where a later Braganza, recipient of gold and diamonds from Brazil, constructed the gilded library of the ancient University in the early eighteenth century, a second age of imperial splendour.

Other delights include the Templar headquarters at Tomar (Romanesque with later additions of extraordinary maritime-inspired effusion), the extremely decorative World Heritage city of Évora, charming villages and hilltop castles in the remotest of remote country – looking out over that traditional enemy, Castile. The heart of Portugal: today a republic, a democracy, a member of the EU, a deeply historic country struggling to be modern.

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