Pousada Mosteiro de Guimarães

Guimarães is where Portugal started. Afonso Henriques was born here, declared himself king here in the 12th century, and the town has traded on it ever since with a sign on the old wall reading that Portugal was born here. The historic centre is a UNESCO World Heritage site and is genuinely well preserved rather than restored into blandness.

Above it, on the slope of the Penha hill, stands the monastery of Santa Marinha da Costa, founded in the 12th century for the Augustinians and rebuilt repeatedly over the following six hundred years.

Its conversion into a pousada is one of the significant works of modern Portuguese architecture. Fernando Távora, the founding figure of the Porto school and the teacher of both Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura, took the project on and worked through the 1970s and early 80s, and it won the National Architecture Prize in 1985. His approach, which the generation after him inherited, was to make the new work legible as new rather than fake the old, so the additions read clearly against the monastic fabric.

There are 51 rooms. Public spaces run to cloisters, long stone corridors, azulejo panels and a dining room in the old monastic quarters, and the terraces and gardens look down over the town and out across the Minho.

It is a member of Small Luxury Hotels of the World.

Worth pairing with a visit to the Pousada at Amares, an hour away, where Souto de Moura did to a Cistercian monastery what his teacher had done to this one. Between the two you can read three generations of Portuguese architecture on a single weekend.