Spend a few winters in the Algarve and the south starts to feel like the whole country. The beaches, the golf, the long lunches by the marina make it easy to settle in and forget how much sits above the hills of Monchique.
Portugal is small by area, yet it changes character every couple of hours you travel, and most of that variety lies north of the sunbelt. For anyone who wants to see the rest of it without spending a fortnight behind the wheel, guided tours to Portugal fold the long drives, the vineyard stops and the mountain roads into a single arranged trip, which suits anyone short on time or new to the north. Here are five regions that reward the effort of heading inland, each with its own reason to go.
The Douro Valley, where the wine begins
The Douro rises in Spain and runs west across the north of Portugal to the sea at Porto, and along the way it carves out the oldest demarcated wine region on earth. Steep hillsides here have been cut into narrow terraces by hand over two thousand years, then planted with the vines that become port and, increasingly, very good table wine. Seen from the river, or from a viewpoint above towns such as Pinhão and Peso da Régua, an entire valley appears reshaped for a single crop. You can take it in three ways. Drive the N222, a road that curls along the water and turns up on lists of the prettiest in Europe. Ride the old train from Porto's São Bento station, which hugs the bank for much of the route. Or give up the wheel and board a boat, drifting past the wine estates with a glass in hand. Most quintas open their cellars for tours and tastings, and many now serve long lunches on terraces that hang above the river. September, during the grape harvest, is the busiest and most alive time to arrive.
Porto, read layer by layer
At the river's mouth sits Porto, the country's second city and the place most Douro trips begin or end. It is smaller and steeper than Lisbon, and it rewards walking. The Ribeira district drops in tiers to the water, its houses stacked in ochre and faded blue, with the double-deck Dom Luís I bridge reaching across to Vila Nova de Gaia on the far bank. Over there sit the port lodges, cool cellars where the wine ages in barrels before it is shipped around the world. Back on the near side, São Bento station is worth a stop for its entrance hall alone, lined with thousands of painted tiles that lay out scenes from the country's past. Climb the Clérigos tower for the view, or join the queue at Livraria Lello, a bookshop so ornate that it is often linked to the early Harry Potter stories. None of this takes long to reach on foot, which is part of the pleasure of the place. A day or two is enough to feel you understand its shape.
Peneda-Gerês and the wild north
North and east of Porto the country turns green and nearly empty. Peneda-Gerês is the only national park in Portugal, a run of granite peaks, oak woods and fast rivers pushed up against the Spanish border. Rain feeds it for much of the year, which is why the slopes stay so lush and the waterfalls keep running into summer. Walkers come for trails that thread through all of it, from river pools cold enough to make you gasp to ridgelines with long views into Galicia. The park is also lived in. Villages such as Soajo and Lindoso still keep their espigueiros, raised granaries on mushroom-shaped legs that store maize away from damp and animals. Half-wild garrano ponies graze the higher ground, and you may share a track with long-horned cattle. This is a different Portugal from the one on the postcards, quieter and older, and it sits in sharp contrast to a few days spent tasting wine downstream.
Coimbra, a city built around a university
Roughly halfway between Porto and Lisbon, on a hill above the Mondego river, Coimbra holds one of the oldest universities in continuous use in Europe, with roots in the thirteenth century. The old campus crowns the town, and its centrepiece is the Joanina Library, a gilded baroque hall from the 1720s where a small colony of bats is 
released at night to eat the insects that would otherwise chew through the books. Students still wear black capes here, and the traditions that come with them run deep. Coimbra has its own form of fado, sung by men rather than the women of Lisbon, slower and bound up with student life and goodbyes. Below the university the streets fall steeply toward the river through arches and small squares, past a heavy Romanesque cathedral that has stood since the twelfth century. Cross the bridge for the finest view back at the town rising in stone above the water. Few travellers stay long, which is a pity, because a slow afternoon here explains a good deal about how the country reads its own past.
Snow and stone in the Serra da Estrela
The highest ground in mainland Portugal lies inland rather than on the coast, in the Serra da Estrela. These are the tallest mountains in the country outside the islands, climbing to just under two thousand metres at the rounded summit called Torre. Winter brings real snow, and the slopes above Manteigas hold the only ski runs in the country, which tends to surprise people who picture Portugal purely as somewhere to lie on a beach. Through the rest of the year the range is walking and driving country, with hundreds of kilometres of marked trails, glacial valleys and stone villages where little seems to have shifted in decades. It is also the home of Serra da Estrela cheese, a soft sheep's milk cheese scooped from its rind with a spoon and sold in the mountain towns. Shepherds still move flocks across these heights, and the large Estrela mountain dog was bred to guard them. Come here last, after the wine, the cities and the green of the north, and Portugal starts to look less like a coastline and more like a country with real range to it.
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