Best places: Churches in Penalva do Castelo, Portugal

👍👍 Seemingly normal small rural village church turns out to be an amazing tourist attraction and landmark. Behind the alter you begin to notice this isn't your regular Aldeia church - there are caves. The church itself engulfs a large rock which creates a claustrophobically tight passageway. Very wort...

👍 Here we have a good example of what happened to the great Portuguese monasteries, with the extinction of religious orders in 1834, in which the Portuguese state (at the time a constitutional Monarchy) to finance itself after bankruptcy (the country had gone through the devastating Napoleonic invasio...