Welcome to Alcobaça

Small places like this are often visited because someone recommended them to us or because they were described as a must-see by some tourist guides after the hundreds of other places to visit. Isn't that how people find out about towns like that?

It was a bit different for me. I had no idea the place existed and had such a lovely church and monastery until I bought a bag of apples in the supermarket. Yep - apples. The following again.. again...
And they had this sticker on the saying "Maçã de Alcobaça". For a foreigner, it is such a catchy name! Easy to remember, and that made me google the place. Not because of the history, but because I wanted to see where all those apples came from!?





It turned out that the small city is surrounded by dozens and dozens of orchards and on top of that, it is a nice place to visit. One day is absolutely enough, so one sunny morning we packed ourselves into the car and drove to check the apples town.

We found a nice, big and quite empty parking lot close to the center, which was a huge bonus, and straight away I saw the towers of the church (two photos above).





As I mentioned, the place is not big. The old center is the most visited, I guess; the rest are just houses and normal residential areas. The good thing was that even the center wasn't packed with tourists, and the walk in the light spring sun was very pleasant.

This blue building turned out to be a children's Wellness Center :). How cute is that?

Built on the old grounds of the fence of the Monastery of Alcobaça, next to the bank of the river Alcôa, the Chalet was built between the years of 1891 and 1892, standing out for the blue color of its facade.
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And just a few meters away we get to the monastery walls. And still, there are hardly any people or cars there. Yay!





Keep on walking, passing small shops, more little streets and huge green trees that give a nice shadow and we reach a large square... again.. with hardly any people. It's almost too good to be true :)





The stunning entrance to the church. I will have a separate post on that, because the building is breathtaking.

The church and monastery were the first Gothic buildings in Portugal, and, together with the roughly older Augustinian Monastery of Santa Cruz in Coimbra, it was one of the most important mediaeval monasteries in Portugal
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And right in front of it a tree that did not have leaves yet was decorated with the colourful crocheted Easter eggs. I am not a big fan of decorating trees like that, but this was so colorful and looked so nice with the huge, white building behind it that I couldn't resit taking more than one photo :)

Small houses, small coffee shops and small restaurants. This is the old part of the city surrounding the monastery. Pretty cute and relaxing and still... tables are empty.

Where is everyone?