VISEU-IN60BP
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From its high plateau, Viseu surveys the country
around with the air of a feudal overlord, and indeed, this dignified
little city is capital of all it can see. The heart of the medieval
city has changed little, though it's approached now through the broad
avenues of a prosperous provincial centre: parts of the walls survive
and it's within their circuit, breached by two doughty gateways, that
almost everything of interest lies. At the city's highest point is
the huge Praça da Sé, the paved square in front of the
cathedral, best approached from the central Rossío through the
Porta do Solar. Here, amid a line of granite buildings, stand the
white Baroque facade of the Igreja da Misericórdia and the
Cathedral, a weighty twin-towered Romanesque base on which a
succession of generations have made their mark. The facade is stern
granite, but the interior is a great hall with intricate vaulting,
carved to represent twisted and knotted ropes. The cathedral's
Renaissance cloister is one of the most graceful in the country; the
rooms of its upper level, looking out over the tangled roofs of the
oldest part of the town, house the cathedral's treasures, including a
twelfth-century Bible. The greatest treasure of Viseu, though, is the
adjacent Museu Grão Vasco (Tues-Sun 9.30am-12.30pm &
2-5pm; 250$00, free Sun mornings). Vasco Fernandes - known always as
Grão Vasco, the Great Vasco - was the key figure in a school
of Flemish-influenced painters which flourished here in the first
half of the sixteenth century. The centrepiece of the collection is
his masterly St Peter on his Throne; it owes considerably more to the
Renaissance than some of the earlier paintings but its Flemish roots
are still evident.