Aveiro Canals

Aveiro's three canals - Central, São Roque and dos Santos Mártires - are what remain of the lagoon channels that made the town a port, and they are worked by moliceiros: flat-bottomed boats with a high curved prow, painted along the sides with panels that are traditionally a mix of religious scenes, local views and frankly bawdy cartoons with rhyming captions, which surprises visitors who assume they are folkloric decoration. The boats were built to harvest moliço, seaweed cut from the lagoon bed and spread on fields as fertiliser, and they now run tourist circuits of about forty-five minutes. The town around them is unusually rich in Art Nouveau, with a concentration of facades from the 1900s built on the wealth of salt, fishing and ceramics, and a museum devoted to them. Ovos moles, egg-yolk sweets in wafer shells, are the local speciality.

What you actually see

• The moliceiros - painted flat-bottomed boats with high prows and bawdy panel captions.
• The three canals - the surviving channels running through the town centre.
• The Art Nouveau - a concentration of 1900s facades with its own museum.
• The ovos moles - egg-yolk sweets in wafer shells sold throughout.

When to go

April to October for boats. Half a day. Boat trips run about forty-five minutes and queue in season.

Honest expectations

The boat trips are short, crowded and touristic - the boats no longer work the lagoon. Canal water is not clean. Very busy in summer with day-trippers from Porto. The painted panels are often more explicit than visitors expect.

Nearby

Costa Nova and its striped houses are west; the São Jacinto dunes are across the lagoon.