INTERRENT Car Rental at Porto Airport

A convenient shuttle takes passengers with car rental bookings to the car hire service stations in the Porto airport complex. InterRent car rental at Porto Airport arranges for a pick-up/drop-off service with customers. Simply call +351 21 145 1381. The InterRent service station is open from 7.30 to midnight every day. Hiring a car from InterRent at Porto Airport means getting a contract that includes unlimited mileage, car passengers insurance and partial collision damage waiver. The InterRent fleet includes vehicles like the Fiat 500, Nissan Pulsar and Ford Focus, small cars ideal for travelling in northwest Portugal's historic towns and cities.

Day trips from Porto reveal the most interesting facts about the region's past. Famous for its Port wine and table wine production, the region is also well known historically for leather products and goldsmiths. At São João da Madeira, near Porto, it's the industrial heritage, rather than the wine, art or architecture of the region that is on display. Located at Oliva Tower, where the Welcome Center of Industrial Tourism is housed, the Shoe Museum of São João da Madeira exhibits more than 500 shoes and 77 tools related to shoe-making. Overall, the city houses a collection of more than 8,600 interesting pieces of industrial origin, sourced from Portugal and around the world. The town also has its own hat museum, so if you're into fashion, this is the place to come.

The Art Center is located at Rua da Fundição 240, and displays modern sculpture, tapestry, drawings and paintings, multimedia art installations and photography. Open from Mondays to Fridays from 2.00 pm to 8.00 pm and on Saturdays from 9.00 am to 1.00 pm, the Art Center is one of São João da Madeira's hidden treasures. It takes about 35 minutes to get from Porto to São João da Madeira via the A32 motorway.

The A1 motorway takes art lovers and culture tourists to Coimbra. Coimbra lies south-east of Porto and is one of Portugal's great university cities. As the former capital, Comibra shows many fine examples of churches and public buildings, including the University of Coimbra itself and the rich merchant mansions and palaces in the medieval heart of the city. Noteworthy are especially the Biblioteca Jonanina with its 18th century bell tower and the 12th century Sé Velha, Coimbra's "old" Romanesque cathedral. The university's magnificent library stocks more than 300,000 books from the 16th century onward (http://visit.uc.pt/en/library/). The gilt-covered interior is a reminder that the university started life as a palace built for royalty.

Coimbra on the mouth of the Mondego River is also a great place to come for shopping and sitting in historic cafes to watch the world go by. In the city center lies the Monastery of Santa Cruz, where the tomb of the country's first king, Afonso Henriques, is located. One the city's greatest tourist attractions, and much loved by locals too, are Santa Clara pastries, or arrufadas. These sweet buns served in several historic "pastelarias" have their origin in the Santa Clara Monastery of Coimbra. This 14th century convent once housed nuns who must have enjoyed the river views over the Mondego, but not the fact that their convent was frequently flooded.

Declared a national monument in 1910, the Monastery of Santa Clara has been very well preserved in parts and extremely well reconstructed in others. A lovely Gothic fountain, a chapter house and dining room bring to life what it was like when nuns first lived here.

If you plan to hire a car via InterRent at Porto Airport, the trip from Porto to Coimbra takes around 1 hour and 20 minutes via the A1.