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This post is NOT going to be Porto which was our home base for a couple of nights. These are the areas around Porto that we visited to begin with.
The first pictures of the white house with the cool towers on the front and interesting stairs with the reflecting pond is Mateus Palace. It is in the Civil Parish of Mateus in the city of Vila Real. This place has a winery, a manor house and a chapel. It was built in the 1700s and is a very very famous example of a Baroque residence from that time period. Starting in the 1940s there was a variety of port wine that was exported to the UK and US that was called Mateus Rose. It had a picture of the manor house on it's bottle. Many on our tour recognized the house from that brand.
Bom Jesus is the white church on top of the hill and it is just outside of Braga. Sanctuary of Bom Jesus do Monte is a Portuguese Catholic shrine in Tenões, outside the city of Braga, in northern Portugal. Its name means Good Jesus of the Mount.
This sanctuary is a notable example of Christian pilgrimage site with a monumental, Baroque stairway that climbs 116 meters (381 feet). It is an important tourist attraction of Braga., Guimaraes but the first chapel was built in this location in 1373. This pilgrimage chapel and UNESCO World Heritage site was built in 1722 and replaced one that was rebuilt in 1629. The last stairs were built in 1781. The interesting thing is the stairs are for the Pilgrims to hike up (they are supposed do do it on their knees.) For the rest of us, there is a Water Lift. What it is is what looks like two trolly cars on a track that is quite steep that parallels the stairs to the left of the aerial photos. They are connected by a cable. One goes down while the other goes up. The power source is a diverted stream where they pump a tank below the trolly car full of water on the uphill tram. Then when it is full the weight pulls it down and pulls the other lower car up. It is really pretty cool.
There are a few photos here of a very old chapel in the district of Braga in a town called Guimaraes, Its historic town centre has been listed as a UNESCO world heritage site since 2001. The exterior of the chapel is NOT in this batch of pictures. The interior is. The exterior is not all that significant. I have the photos but they are nothing special. It is medieval and medieval is pretty architecturally castle wall like. NOT pretty like what you see in some of the cathedrals built later. The cool exterior from this town is the Nossa Senhora da Consolação e dos Santos Passos Church is a beautiful Baroque church that really draws half of its charm from a geometrically laid out garden on Largo de Brasil. It was completed in 1785. The two bell towers were added in the 1800s and apparently it is pretty impressive inside (all neoclassical) but we were running to get on a bus and did not get to go inside that one.