Travel question: Where should we stop off on our Portugal road trip?

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The outstanding Biblioteca Joanina is a must-see (Getty)

Q We are travelling to Porto next week for a few nights. We wondered about renting a car and driving down to Lisbon and back. Where would you recommend we stop along the way?

Katherine H

A There is plenty of interest between the two biggest cities in Portugal. Heading south from Porto, the first notable location is Aveiro, a small and friendly city with a network of canals. Next, Coimbra is simply magnificent: the heart of Portuguese academia, with a university installed in a hilltop palace. The highlight is the Biblioteca Joanina – an outstanding Baroque library.

Continue to the walled city of Obidos (a lot less crowded in June than July), and then head to the seaside: Peniche has ancient cobbled streets, but also a broad beach with superb surfing.

All of these places are easily connectable by car, but I question whether you need one. Certainly, if you are planning to spend any time in Lisbon, you may grow to regret it because of problems with parking.

Instead, consider the much more relaxed option of taking public transport, which is cheap and reliable.

Frequent suburban trains run south from Porto to Aveiro in about an hour, with stopping or interregional services from there to Coimbra also taking around an hour (make sure you buy a ticket for Coimbra’s historic main station, not Coimbra-B on the main line, which is some distance from the centre).

For the link from Coimbra to Obidos, you will need to change at Caldas da Rainha; the journey takes two hours 30 minutes in total, or just get a taxi for the short second stretch.

Peniche is a bus ride away from Obidos, and from there you can find buses all the way to Lisbon. And from the capital, fast inter-city trains race back to Porto in under three hours.

Every day our travel correspondent Simon Calder tackles a reader’s question. Just email yours to s@hols.tv or tweet @simoncalder