Some information about the lovely city of Coimbra.
Coimbra has Portugal’s oldest university dating from 1290. The university buildings of today are at the top of a hill. There are buses to the top but most people choose to walk uphill for between 10-15 minutes. The Joanine Library is the most popular attraction and for this reason visitors have to purchase timed tickets i.e. tickets that allow you to visit the Joanine library at a certain time, usually on the following day.
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My advice is to buy the earliest possible tickets (if possible get the 9am tickets) and the chances are there will be fewer people in the Joanine library at the same time as you – the maximum number of visitors per group is 60 and the library is not that big.
All visitors are allowed a maximum of 10 minutes in the Joanine library before being politely asked to leave before the next group are allowed in. I think the time interval between tickets is 20 minutes. A ticket to the Joanine library also allows visitors to see the student jail cells where errant students were placed if they disagreed too vehemently with their professors and another considerably less interesting library. Both these items are before the Joanine library. There is no photography in the Joanine library.
Throughout the 1720s bronze workers, glaziers, painters, and other craftsmen ornamented the interior of the library. The stone floor is patterned with geometric motifs, and the plaster ceilings are decorated with trompe-l’oeil paintings. The library was finished in 1728 and housed its first books in 1750. It now contains 56,000 volumes, many of which date from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries
My advice after visiting the Joanine library is to visit the small chapel of St Michael before the first large groups arrive around 9:45am.
Another observation is that there are two train stations in Coimbra. The intercity trains stop at Coimbra B station in the north of the city from where passengers can catch local trains to Coimbra station free of charge. Coimbra station is closer to the city centre.
