The bathing establishment itself is primitive enough, consisting of about twenty baths large and small, in separate wooden compartments, built round three sides of a square, the temperature of the water being about 85° Fahr., very abundant, clear, and bright, and with a strong sulphureous taste and smell. The waters are said to be extraordinarily efficacious in cutaneous affections, maladies of the mucous membranes, laryngitis, bronchitis, and rheumatism, and as many as 1500 patients visit them from May to September every year, the flow of water being a quarter of a million litres a day.
All the way from Taipas to Guimarães the road lay through maize fields bordered thickly by vine-covered poplars; a prosperous land of well-fed, laborious people. Near the ancient city, the birthplace of the Portuguese monarchy, the ground rises, and the pine forests spread for miles on the uplands all around, the fresh sweet scent of the woods adding one more sensuous joy to a closing day of incomparable loveliness. As the carriage clattered over the cobble stones, through the narrow streets of the town, and so into the beautiful alameda and the public garden, in which the principal hotel stands, there rose as if from the end of the alameda the giant granite peak of the Penha, all glorified and transfigured by the setting sun. The mountain, almost sheer as seen from this side, seemed to tower right overhead: green woods clothed its sides up the greater part of its height, and then, like a wall, sprang a precipice of bare scarred rock, now orange and purple against a violet sky. On the summit of the apparently inaccessible saw edge of the peak stood out the white walls of a building, which may have been a hermitage, but I am told is now a guest-house, where in the most torrid summer the citizens of Guimarães find cool breezes and refreshment. As I gazed, entranced at the changing colours of the sunset on the peak—orange deepening to crimson and to bronze, purple fading by soft degrees to slaty-blue, and the rose-pink of the growing after-glow softening the rugged outlines with tender light—there came the clanging of an acolyte’s bell, and across the alameda there wound a devout little procession bearing the Host, with flaring tapers, swinging censers, priests, and choristers. It was the one note needed to complete the picture. Guimarães in the gathering twilight took me back in one happy moment to the ages long ago, when simple faith unbroken reigned, and all was beautiful and all was true.