The country called Portugal is almost 900 years old. As you can imagine, it has a few interesting stories to tell. The past vibrates in everyday life. Portuguese history is a privilege – one that you can also experience in exclusive ways, if you know how to get there.

One of the most extraordinary places to experience this is the Joanina Library in the city of Coimbra, a city that is a kind of Portuguese Athens in the sense of the elevation of knowledge. A few years ago, an important British newspaper declared this library one of the most spectacular in the world, and it was right.

The Joanina is at the heart of an offer you can’t refuse: a private, totally exclusive tour by a member of this university founded in 1290, which makes it one of the 20 oldest in the world. This access leads to spaces not open to the general public, such as the St Michael’s chapel sacristy, the Senate Room or the Private Chapel of the Rector. But the library…

King João the 5th, ruler of the most sumptuous reign in Portuguese history in the 18th century, welcomes us with his coat of arms on the door of the imposing Baroque façade. Inside, this architectural revelry continues, guarding a fabulous world of 60,000 volumes, including a 15th century Hebrew Bible, of which only around 20 copies exist on the planet, and a 1462 Bible printed by two of Gutenberg’s partners after its famous first version.

All this can be discovered in a personal experience, without groups of hurried visitors. And if you visit the library at the end of the day, near sunset, pay close attention to the ceiling: you might find one of the bats that live there. Yes, inside! And they’re very important: they feed on insects that can attack books. (We warned you at the beginning of the text that we had some very interesting stories to tell).

And while we’re talking about books, there’s nothing like travelling even further north from Coimbra to the Six Senses Douro Valley. This luxury resort is housed in a superbly renovated 19th-century manor house that is the setting for one of the most important novels in 20th-century Portuguese literature, “Vale Abraão” (“The Valley of Abraham”), by the great Agustina Bessa-Luís. It was here, in fact, that another cultural giant, Manoel de Oliveira, directed the film based on the book.

How better to soak up this historic atmosphere at Six Senses, overlooking the vine covered hills by the Douro river? Well, just trust us: by asking the restaurant – which is called Vale Abraão, there you have it – to serve an intimate dinner in the small grotto on the property.

There are no bats here, but there are also centuries of history – and here you can start rewriting your own.