Melchior Moreira
President of Tourism of Oporto and North of Portugal – ER
The route of the Romanesque in the northern region of Portugal is one of the most beautiful and interesting examples of how it's can retrieve the invaluable heritage of a territory, making it available to "All" in the true nature of the word.
The diverse set of monuments that embodies this important cultural route is properly prepared in order to make possible their visits by a broad spectrum of different publics, complemented even with appropriate reading materials, allowing everyone to collect experiences of great sensory pleasure – in monasteries asleep by the silence of songs that still echoes today in the imagination of many of us; in churches and chapels that are symbols of religious fervour of an extraordinary people; in castles and towers that keep secrets difficult to unravel, on bridges linking the banks of bucolic rivers, or, in "memorials" so often guided by the simplicity of their decoration, but who, even so, do not cease to be full of a strong symbolism that depicts the profile of who rests there.
In the middle of a rich and varied landscape, dressed in a complex palette of shades which change with the seasons, the Route of the Romanesque in the northern region of Portugal is a unique opportunity and a real challenge to visit fantastic places and meet monuments of great artistic and sculptural beauty, in perfect harmony with the prodigious and lavish nature of their three valleys – Sousa, Douro and Tâmega. Here, the pleasant and enriching journey that the Romanesque Route allows you to do throughout history, is worth it not only just by the experiences offered by the rich set of monuments that aggregates, as for inviting and diverse set of tourist resources of a territory where, above all, its people like and know how to receive.
A territory ruled by the purity of the environment, by the diversity and the genuineness of an offer that contributes for, effectively, Oporto and the North of Portugal can be a unique tourist destination.
With monuments spread over places that help us many times to understand the geography of the territory of the past, the Romanesque Route is in fact "a multifaceted experience founded in history" and a genuine invitation so that we can let our imagination go, walk through nature, know the people that live here and see up close their traditions but, also, examples of modernity, result of the promotion of a growing entrepreneurship, which aims to achieve excellence in various fields, among which tourism earns more and more strength and sense, as the extraordinary work that has been carried out with a great passion by the Romanesque Route, as a product that gives greater prestige and notoriety to the tourist destination "Oporto and North of Portugal".