Portugal

Portugal faces the Atlantic rather than the Mediterranean, and nearly everything that makes it distinctive follows from that — the clear light, the seafood, the summers that stay bearable, and the voyages that once made a small country enormously rich. Lisbon still counts close to 2,900 hours of sunshine a year, more than almost any capital in Europe. It is warm without being punishing, walkable, good value by Western European standards, and only a few hours from Ireland.

April to June brings long bright days, hillsides in flower and comfortable walking weather in both cities. High summer is hot and dry, with August afternoons near 30°C in Lisbon and a few degrees cooler up in Porto, which catches more of the Atlantic. September and October are the connoisseur's months — the sea at its warmest, the crowds thinning, and the Douro harvest under way by late September.

Lisbon is built across seven hills above the Tagus, and the climb is half the pleasure. The Alfama — the tangle of lanes that survived the 1755 earthquake — sits beneath the walls of São Jorge castle, where yellow trams grind up gradients no bus would attempt and fado carries out of small rooms after dark. Below it the Baixa opens into the formal squares laid out after the quake. West along the river at Belém stand the Jerónimos Monastery and the Belém Tower, both built on the wealth of the voyages that sailed from this shore, and the café that has been making custard tarts to the monastery's recipe since 1837. Sintra's palaces and the beaches at Cascais are half an hour out by train.

Porto is smaller, steeper and more workmanlike, and plenty of people quietly prefer it. The old town falls to the river at Ribeira in a stack of tiled and shuttered houses, with the great iron arch of the Dom Luís I bridge spanning the gorge above. Cross it into Vila Nova de Gaia and you are among the port lodges, which have aged their wine in cool cellars for three centuries and will nearly all pour you a glass with the river in view. In the city itself, São Bento station is lined with twenty thousand blue-and-white tiles and the Livraria Lello draws queues to one of the handsomest bookshops anywhere.

The one thing not to miss is the Douro. An hour east of Porto the river cuts through terraced hillsides hand-carved out of schist since the eighteenth century — the oldest demarcated wine region on earth, and a landscape that reduces most first-time visitors to silence. It is one of seventeen UNESCO World Heritage sites in a country of ten million people, alongside Porto's historic centre, Lisbon's Belém monuments, Sintra, Évora, Guimarães and the university at Coimbra. Portugal is small enough to cross in an afternoon and old enough to keep you busy for a fortnight.