Coimbra University & Wine

Coimbra University & Wine

Every night for 250 years, staff at the Joanine Library have draped leather sheets over the tables. Not to protect them from students — to protect them from the colony of bats living in the Baroque ceiling. The bats are pest control: they eat the insects that would destroy 70,000 irreplaceable books. King Dinis I founded this university in 1290. Students still wear black capes and still rip them at graduation — a 700-year-old ritual called the rasganço. Time your visit for Queima das Fitas in May: 4,000 caped students singing fado at midnight outside the 12th-century cathedral. No wine region on earth has a better soundtrack.