TRAVEL / A dance to the music of wine: Away from the Algarve, the hills are heavy with the scent of pine, quince and the latest vintage. Michael Pye gets heady on the real Portugal

SO I'M sitting here in my Manhattan apartment, a glass of 1966 Colares wine (full, red, earthy) in hand, the fado wailing out over sharp Portuguese guitars through the hi-fi speakers. The tenor's on: 'Coimbra,' he sings, 'is even more lovely, the day you're saying goodbye . . .'

It is the sentiment you expect from a nation with monuments to saudade, a word that's an omnibus of longing and regret. But the curious thing is this: I feel it, too - saudade for Portugal, for the valleys around the city of Coimbra, for what's come to be 'my' village. The feeling is to ordinary nostalgia what whirlwinds are to a breeze.

I could list the obvious attractions. Cycling through a spring valley that smells of pine resin and eucalyptus, heavy with old gold mimosa, alive with almond blossom, scillas, kingcups, daisies; or the same valley in autumn, when the smells are of grapes and new wine, the dry cornstacks and the ripe quinces. The old leaves hang on the vines like brilliant red stained glass. Passing along a hedge with the sounds of a dinner party behind it, and seeing that a village has come out to harvest one man's corn; and they're gossiping, chattering, tasting red wine. Walking the lanes of Coimbra, their mosaic pavements so shiny and their angles so steep that one of them is called 'Break-ribs Street'. Watching the seaweed boats, like painted gondolas, racing into the port of Aveiro across a lagoon of dead salt-water. Arguing in a priest's cellar over a brilliant bottle.

Walking the village street, cellar by cellar, full of wine that's resinous, wine with too many fruity wild grapes, wine that's delicious, wine that's chickenshit (because Sao never does wash her feet). Listening to fado on the moonlit steps of a fine Manueline church. Swimming in a dammed-up river at Lousa, in cool woods under a castle tower. Dancing at one of the four-day festejos, where the pace is somewhere between a waltz and a 100-yard dash, furiously athletic. But those are tourist memories, just ordinarily glorious. There is something else.

I never thought there was anywhere left to discover in Europe. I thought everywhere was investigated, documented, with heritage walks and audio tours and those admirable Swiss signposts which tell you even how long a walk will take. A little history, a good guidebook, and there are no more surprises left, let alone serious mystery.

Then there's Portugal. In Portugal, you can start seeing things for yourself again. I don't mean the Algarve, of course, nor even all that romance in the hill town of Sintra above Lisbon. I'd far rather be in what has become 'my' Portugal.

Wedged between Oporto and Lisbon, it is north of the great Templar fortress at Tomar, with all its mysteries, and the shrine at Fatima; well south of the Douro river; west of the high mountains of the Serra da Estrela; east of the beaches around Figueira da Foz, their glory betrayed by undertows and the Atlantic wind. Nowhere in particular, really.

We found it out of dumb courage. We were falling in love with Portugal, and it was time to learn Portuguese. The University of Coimbra, old as Oxford or Padua or Paris but with a more chequered history, has summer courses, one month long, in language, culture, even cinema. So, 20 years since I last tangled with a new language, I was back in a cool, tiled classroom in a class of 30, getting grammar wrong.

Nobody was there quite by accident. Some wanted to live in Portugal; some were missionaries (they forgave the language for its complexity); one was a Jesuit (he didn't). Some were language students; three were Japanese. One was a Dutchwoman who wanted finally to know what her noble Portuguese in-laws were saying.

It makes you feel purposeful, this kind of language course. You keep hoping that the future subjunctive will install itself like software, that one day you'll wake up and those triple-embedded pronouns will seem less like crossword clues. You listen hard to the teacher's gags - that Portuguese was deliberately made complex so the Spanish wouldn't understand. You need gags when you're told that you have a perfect Tras-os-Montes accent, which is an achievement of sorts - a bit like speaking perfect Geordie.

Now I don't pretend a month-long language course tells you much about a country. But if you're learning a language, you want to know what things really mean, how things work; you listen hard and part of listening is watching other people's gestures, attitudes, expressions. You look harder than most, and you end up finding more.

You don't just wander around the university. You try to read it. The hilltop is full of brutalist concrete which replaced medieval lanes, slapped down by Antonio de Oliveira Salazar during his dictatorship to punish an over-independent university. It is the perfect metaphor for a country frozen by a dictator. But there are still narrow ways, the student houses called republicas, the long black scarves and gowns for undergraduates, end-of-year ceremonies where the coloured ribbons of each faculty are triumphantly burnt. There are buildings whose white walls and ornate doors and windows, a kind of minimal baroque, suggest grand aspirations and no money to finish them. There is a university library - gold, ebony, rosewood and paint - which shines with colonial wealth. Behind that, rumour says, there are the charts and maps of the great navigation school which made possible the Portuguese discoveries of the 15th and 16th centuries. Even the fact that Portugal's oldest university should be in Coimbra at all is fascinating, a trace of the constantly changing frontiers between Christians and Moors as they battled for territory.

Walk into a museum or a church, and the art you see, you see most directly - without the lumber of theory or history. You have little choice: the great religious works are often in carved, painted wood; intricate and brilliantly theatrical, three-dimensional scenes. It isn't a familiar tradition. You can't go by artists' names or guidebooks. You have to look.

The churches haven't been hollowed out to seem like museums; what's strange and passionate about faith is still there. A chapel at Bussaco has an altar of wax breasts, for mothers without milk. But Moorish culture and habits break into the Christian world again and again - in the shape of a fountain, a courtyard, a tower.

As you look more closely, you discover more than the ghosts of Moorish occupation. In a hamlet, off the main road, the roofs curl up like pagodas in the Chinese style. In the choir of a convent at Aveiro, the decorations are delicately Indian. From the (African) piri-piri peppers in food to the (Celtic) fiddlers at a folklore show, you keep getting clues to the cultural complexity of the Portuguese.

The sense of history is still there partly because brute politics kept Portugal undeveloped for so long. There was a price paid for this lack of change, and it's in the twisted or unfinished limbs of old men, the cruel angles in a widow's spine. What you discover seems distant in time as well as place.

Go out from the city, and you're in a very old country (although it is cut up now with fine new EC-sponsored roads.) Ox carts lumber on the lanes, laden with greenery. The farmers plough with one ox, two men, two women, pulling up the earth as much as cutting it. Widows pass, spritely in black, with bundles on their heads for market; they have a kilometre to walk before they can share a taxi. At night in a small village, an old woman passes on her knees to the chapel - after a promise, or a sin.

Even discovering restaurants is different. We drive to a village (which I cannot name) and ask for a restaurant; we're told there isn't one. We say we've heard there is a woman who sometimes cooks for people. We're inspected, and told to sit in the jumbled bar-cum-shop. After a long while, someone else comes back and says, briskly: 'Follow me.' We go through curtains, a living room, a stockroom and out at the back to a shed of a kitchen with a wood fire smoking at one end, and a long table. Space is made, and we settle down to a fine soup of beans and vegetables, salt cod grilled on a wood fire and pork cooked with bay and peppers, oranges off the tree and wine from brandy bottles. Lunch is memorable.

Of course, we bought a house; discovering takes time, so we needed a long-term base. Of course, we happened to be in a bar when a farmer heard us saying we wanted a house, and he said he had one of those, come this way. Of course, we wonder what we'll do to the balance of the village over time. This isn't the transported Hampstead of Chiantishire or Provence; this is a place where you must not impose, because that would upset the delicate, co-operative way of the valley, the custom that leaves eggs or peaches or a bit of pork on your doorstep because someone has some.

We go along to the annual festa, and we dance and drink and sing, and we're welcomed to the sardinhada, where the fish and peppers are roasted in the street; and the festival committee, the man with the military rockets, the drummers and the local bagpiper (his only tune is Viva Espana) come round to collect our dues for the chapel. And we manage what I thought impossible, in a lovely place: we're discovering, all the time.-

TRAVEL NOTES

GETTING THERE: Fly to Lisbon or Oporto with BA (081-897 4000) from pounds 139 return (min stay 1 Saturday night, max stay 1 month); Trailfinders (071-937 5400) Lisbon return from pounds 109, Oporto from pounds 129. Coimbra is 90 minutes from Oporto, two hours from Lisbon, by Alfa-Service express train or the new motorways. Coimbra is the regional capital, offering trains, comfortable bus services and relatively cheap taxis.

STAYING THERE: Coimbra is the best bet to find a comfortable hotel or pensao. My favourite is Pensao Antunes, by the botanical gardens (Rua Castro Matoso 8, 3000 Coimbra, roughly pounds 25 a night for a double room with adequate, if odd, bathroom; phone 010 351 39 23048). A night at the Bussaco Palace can be booked through Best Western (081-541 0033). The University of Coimbra summer courses run from 1 July to 31 July and cost roughly pounds 250; for more details, contact the Secretariado do Curso de Ferias, Gabinete de Relacoes Internacionais, Faculdade de Letras, 3049 Coimbra, Portugal.

TOUR OPERATORS: Tailor-made fly-drive tours, including flights, accommodation and car hire: Sunvil Holidays (081-568 4499) 2 weeks from around pounds 590; Caravela Tours (071-630 9223) 2 weeks from pounds 606. Caravela also offers 7 nights in a 4-star Coimbra hotel from pounds 533, including flights and car hire.

FURTHER INFORMATION: Portuguese Government Tourist Office, 22-25 Sackville Street, London W1X 1DE (071-494 1441).

(Photographs and map omitted)