"Aveiro" a Aveiro Travel Page by haiamisa

We arrived in Aveiro on the 22nd of September after leaving Braga in the morning and stopping at Guimaraes at noon. We had planned to drive on the smaller roads avoiding the highway (with tolls) like earlier, but by the time we left Guimaraes the traffic was very slow and we decided to enter the highway from Santo Tirso. We passed Porto (we decided not to visit Porto as it would have taken lots of time and there were still other places we wanted to see) driving on A3 that changed into A1 and continued till we saw signs to Aveiro. Entering Aveiro wasn't a good experience. First of all there was a horrible smell from the lagoon from the large paper factory nearby. And we couldn't enter the center by car as it was a car free day in Europe. Something that we figured out only later. We had to leave the car further from the center and from there to walk to the pension and get the car only in the evening when the streets opened. We didn't like the pension either, it was too strange. Also the restaurant we ate at didn't have good food... I guess it just wasn't our lucky day. We were happy to leave Aveiro behind the following day and to continue to Tomar and Leiria.
The town is close to the sea and has canals. The atmosphere is totally different from other places we had been in. What we liked here were the beautifully colored fishing boats.

Some history:
Aveiro was a thriving port throughout the Middle Ages, up until the 1570s when the mouth of the Vouga silted up, closing its harbour and creating vast, fever-ridden marshes. Recovery began only in 1808 when a canal was cut through to the sea, reopening the port and draining much of the water; only the shallow lagoons you see today were left. These form the backbone of a modern economy based on vast saltpans, fishing, and the collection of seaweek (molico) for fertilizer.