A Long Weekend in Porto

The first thing Porto does is make you climb. The city is built on a series of steep hills descending to the Douro River, and the geography is not incidental to the experience — the hills slow you down, force you to look, create unexpected vantage points at every corner, and produce a city that is discovered vertically as much as horizontally. You earn each view. The earning is the point.

Porto is also, depending on which corner of it you are in, one of the most beautiful and most derelict cities in Western Europe simultaneously. The azulejo-covered facades and the abandoned buildings with fig trees growing through their roofs exist in the same street. This is not poverty tourism. It is the texture of a city that has been loved and neglected and loved again across many centuries, and the result is an authenticity — a sense of a place that is not performing for you — that is increasingly difficult to find in European cities that have been comprehensively renovated for their visitors.

The port wine question

Port wine is made in the Douro Valley and aged across the river from Porto in the lodges of Vila Nova de Gaia, which is technically a separate city but connected to Porto by six bridges and entirely understood as part of the Porto experience. The lodges are open for tours and tasting, and the variation between them is more significant than the visitor who does one and considers themselves informed might expect. Graham's, on the hill above the others, has the best views and produces ports across a range from the accessible to the extraordinary. Taylor's is the most serious of the lodge experiences. Ramos Pinto, smaller and less well-known, offers tasting that feels like a conversation rather than a presentation.

The correct relationship with port wine in Porto is not the tour-and-tasting circuit but the glass at the end of a meal in a restaurant that takes it seriously — the twenty-year tawny served at the correct temperature, alongside a cheese or a piece of dark chocolate, as the transition between dinner and evening. This is port as it is intended: not a performance of its heritage but a natural conclusion to a meal in the city it belongs to.

Eating in Porto

The francesinha — Porto's civic dish, a bread-enclosed meat and cheese construction covered in a spiced tomato and beer sauce — is simultaneously the most absurd and the most delicious thing you will eat in Porto. It is not a subtle dish. It is a dish that announces itself with confidence and requires you to commit. Order it at Café Santiago, the institution that has been serving the definitive version since 1959, and eat it with a cold Sagres and no plan for the subsequent two hours. This is the correct approach to the francesinha.

Beyond the francesinha, Porto's food scene has evolved considerably in the past decade. The neighbourhood of Bonfim, east of the centre, has the concentration of contemporary restaurants and natural wine bars that defines the city's current food personality. The Mercado do Bolhão, the iron-and-glass market near the Aliados, reopened after extensive restoration and is the best single place to understand the ingredients — the smoked sausages, the dried salt cod, the fresh cheeses, the enormous variety of olive oils — that define the regional food.

Getting around and getting lost

Porto is small enough to walk most of it in three days, if you accept the hills as a feature rather than a problem. The historic tram lines — particularly the number 22 that runs through the city centre — are worth riding once for the experience and impractical as a primary transport mode. The metro connects the airport to the centre and extends to the coast at Matosinhos, where the seafood restaurants behind the fish market constitute an entirely separate and excellent reason to spend an afternoon.

Matosinhos is the Porto experience that most visitors miss. The fish market is a working market — not a tourist market — that sells the morning's catch to the restaurants on the street behind it. By one o'clock those restaurants are full of people from Porto eating grilled fish at marble-topped tables. The fish is the fish from the market an hour earlier. The wine is the vinho verde from the region twenty minutes north. The bill for two people, with everything, rarely exceeds forty euros. This is the best lunch available within an hour of Porto and it requires nothing from you except showing up and pointing at whatever the man at the next table is eating.

Porto in three nights is not enough. It is enough to know you need to come back, which is the best possible outcome of a short trip to a city with this much in it. Book the return before you leave. You will already be planning it on the flight home.

---

※ End of article