Portugal Gem

Hotel Quinta das Lágrimas, Coimbra, Portugal

We were looking for just one overnight stop between Porto and Lisbon. I had a look on Booking Com as you do and instead of putting in a town I just put in CENTRO as a region. Of the few things I check are Air Con, Wifi and Parking. One was this little hotel that looked as it was in the middle of nowhere. I could not find an exact street address so located it as best I could on Google Earth, got the GPS co-ordinates and bingo put that in the Garmin GPS. Off we go. After a bit of time killing at Aveiro we arrived in Coimbra and got to where my GPS suggested and it was a narrow little cobble street and no sign of our hotel, oops.

After parking, well more like squeezing between a couple of cars and did a bit of walking, to no avail. A bit more time on my google maps and we decided to drive further along this narrow road and stopped at a place with huge garbage bins away from traffic and look a bit more seriously at google. Well right in front of us was a sign about 4 metres long and a metre high and a huge arrow for the Hotel 50M and a huge arrow. FOUND IT!!

A fantastic place and a reasonable price of about 230 Euro a night. Awesome service indeed. A lot of history for a 1326 startup joint. Something about a Spaniard and a Portuguese scandal many moons back, and this huge plot of land now with it’s castle and now a Luxury Hotel.