You could always just take a taxi to cut the distance and spend the extra day gained in Coimbra!
This is from the journal I kept when I did the Portuguese route in February of 2018 and stayed in Coimbra an extra night.
For over a hundred years (from 1145 – 1255) Coimbra was the capital of Portugal, but today it is Coimbra University (founded in 1290) for which the city is best known. I had a hard time figuring out why there were so many tourists here, particularly since it was winter. There is no truly great cathedral in Coimbra like in Lisbon or Porto and there were no “world-class” museums. However, when I looked at my map of the city in my guide book, it became apparent why this city attracts so many visitors. It is the compact size of Coimbra with a nice collection of medieval churches, cloisters, small museums and the University all grouped around the city center and located either directly on or just off the Camino. Together with lots of shops and countless restaurants and cafés everywhere, all clustered among enchanting historic architecture and narrow pedestrian streets, the old part of the city is ideal for strolling leisurely about. In fact the old part of Coimbra was declared a “World Heritage Site” in 2013.
I left Hotel Oslo in the late afternoon planning to have my “leisurely stroll” around the old city and hoping to discover a memorable restaurant for diner. Not far from the Arco de Almedina which was the main gate of the medieval walled defenses of the Old City, I came upon a group of Coimbra University music students all dressed in black, some wearing black capes, playing music in the streets. It was Coimbra fado music which is rooted in the medieval lyrical “trovadorismo”. The twelfth century troubadours sang songs of poetry that had the stylized subject matter of love, of friend, of scorn and of curse. Trovadorismo is considered to be the very first literary movement in Portugal. Coimbra fado is played and sung by men (unlike the fado music in Lisbon where both men and women do the vocals). There were nine students all in their early 20’s in the very professional sounding group I had stopped to appreciate. There was one accordion player and one big stand-up bassist. A small guitar known as “guitar de Coimbra” was being played alongside two larger classical guitars and there were also two small mandolins or an instrument that looked like one. I leaned against the wall of a building on the opposite side of the street and it was not long before my feet began to shuffle, as if detached from the rest of me, to the upbeat song that the “fado students” were strumming out. I started dancing. I was doing my “Southside shuffle”, dancing in the streets of Coimbra and soon I found my exhaustion from yet another day of walking vaporized by the music. There were two tall guys in the troupe of musicians who picked up their tambourines for the next song and they started dancing to the rhythm of the churning upbeat song. The dancing duo were jumping up in the air and slapping their tambourines against the soles of their feet and the appreciative crowd which had gotten bigger started to throw Euros into the empty guitar case used for collecting “tips”.
What a change for me, after walking for weeks in silent meditation, to be dancing joyfully among a crowd of strangers. For the next half hour I was total absorbed in the present moment and having the time of my life. There were a multitude of other street performers “busking in the streets of Coimbra including mimes and puppeteers and actors dressed in medieval costumes. The largest group I saw was the “fado students” and the smallest was the one-man act (that is if you don’t count the monkey with the tip jar) of an organ-grinder. It was a perpetual festival here in the streets of Coimbra and I was feeling very much a part of it.
