Kathleen
6/2/2013 – Porto
The guides books and available information do not, in our opinion, give adequate respect to the city of Porto. Although we knew that this town was the major trade route for Portuguese fortified wine (you guessed it, port) to be delivered to the rest of the world by boat, descriptions we read made it sound rather industrial and not that fun to be in (other than trying all the port tasting rooms on the other side of the river). Nothing could be further from the truth.
We found Porto to be a beautiful diverse city on a steep hill with churches and other beautiful old buildings and museums everywhere. There was so much to do…you could climb an old bell tower, see the amazing palace building which housed the Portuguese stock market from the 1700s until 1990, look at piles of bones and hundreds of crypts in an old convento (convento in Portuguese seems to be a catch-all word encompassing convents, monestaries, and various other types of church institutions), see churches with blue and white tiled facades, take a tram across the bridge, walk across a two story bridge (Porto is on the Douro river which is quite wide here so bridges are very impressive), ride a fanicular, ride a gondola, eat and drink to your hearts’ delight AND visit a ton of port-producing “caves” (this is what they call the tasting rooms). In fact, there was so much to see and do that we almost missed the port tasting completely….we didn’t get around to attempting this until about 7 PM, when almost all of the tasting rooms were closed. We did find one to give us a sip of a few different kinds, which were all good….but fortified wine is not really our cup of tea anyway, so we didn’t feel bad.
The only thing we felt bad about was not having a couple of more days in which to run around Porto, but we packed alot in the time we had and forgot all about it when we arrived at our lovely guest house in Guimares….