Buy House in Vila Real

Vila Real, the capital of the Tras-o-Montes province, is a sleepy university town set in a sea of rural tranquility. The town is located above the confluence of the Rio Cabril and the Rio Corgo. Diogo Cão, who discovered the Congo River in 1482, was born in Vila Real.

The town has long been a popular place to have a second home. The most famous has to be the Palacio do Mateus, used as a holiday home by the Portuguese royal family during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Palacio do Mateus, which is featured on bottles of well-known Mateus rose wine, was built in 1745 to a design by the fashionable Italian architect, Nicola Nasoni.

With a striking Baroque facade, an ornate balustraded stairway, granite wings, rooftop statues, and a garden that boasts an impressive thirty-five-meter cedar tunnel, the Mateus Palace is considered by many to be one of the best country houses in Europe and a near-perfect example of Baroque architecture. The palace and gardens are open to the public with guided tours on offer that take in a strange collection of macabre religious artifacts including a piece of a holy fingernail and some saintly eyeballs, apparently bought from the Vatican. In 1971 the Mateus Palace became a private foundation and now hosts various music concerts, art exhibitions, and literary prizes.