Friday 18 September 2026 – We had the luxury of not having to walk several kilometres in order to find our baggage in a different town, but we didn’t have the ultimate morning luxury of turning off the alarm altogether, for we had to meet a guide who would show us around Porto. We fortified ourselves with a decent breakfast at the hotel and met the charming Claudia at 10am in the hotel reception. She spent three hours showing us around various neighbourhoods and explaining some of the history and matters of significance in the city. For various reasons it was difficult to get photos as we went, so we revisited one or two locations to get proper photos and also looked in on other areas after she left us. So the following is just a general mishmash of the day rather than the taut and gripping narrative that you would reasonably expect from me.
As you saw from the final photo in yesterday’s entry, the hotel we’re in is right next to a sodding great iron bridge, which is a strong contributing factor to the hotel being called the Vincci Ponte de Ferro. It’s a superb hotel in an excellent location – comfortable, well-organised and with good service. It is very unusually configured. This is the panel which can be found around the hotel which explains the set up.
One enters on level 14. To get to our room, one takes the lift down to level 10, and then hops along a corridor to another lift to go further down to, in our case, level 6. I wondered what this setup looks like from the outside, and walking across the sodding great iron bridge, formally known as the Ponte Luis I, gives one a chance to look back at the hotel as it sits on the side of a cliff.
At the top right of the picture is the monastery. Immediately below its buttressing is the level of the hotel from floors 10 – 15. Below that, the grey area is the Level 10 restaurant, and to the left of that are floors 1-9 of bedrooms.
The walk over the bridge gives a chance to view the old city walls close up.
To us, they looked a bit flimsy, and in fact what you see here is a reconstruction; at the base of the crenelated stretch you can see the remains of original walls, which look a lot sturdier. Also, when you get to look behind the crenelated part, you see that it’s not just a single wall; it’s more robust than it looks.
There is only a single fragment of the original walls left standing in the cty itself;
all the other city walls were knocked down as the Powers That Be decided that there was no need for a robust defense. Carrying on from the bridge takes you to the cathedral,
outside which is the starting point for those people wanting to take the section of the Caminho Português from here to Santiago.
248km to go, then. (Actually, not, but you’ll have to stay tuned to find out why.)
Outside the cathedral is a very fancy pillory
which is a relatively modern reconstruction of a 16th-century Manueline original, which was torn down in the early 19th century during the wars between Peter IV and his brother Miguel.
Entry into the cathedral is a bit complicated. You join a queue and get your ticket – but then there’s no information about what to do then; we just went in the opposite direction to all the people who were obviously leaving. The first place you get to then is a small but well-formed cloister
which has some delightful tiling.
Various exits from the cloister lead to various other places. The first one we went through took us up (36 steps) to a gallery overlooking the cloister
whence one could take a further 81 (quite chunky) steps to get to the top of one of the towers, where there is a great view over the city,
and back over to Vila Nova de Gaia, too.
After that, we blundered about trying to find our way down and out, which took a few goes before we succeeded. So we saw a few other rooms in the cathedral complex as well, one of which had a statue of good old Santiago himself
and a marvellous ceiling.
We eventually found our way into the nave
which has a very elaborately carved and gilded altar piece
and choir stalls.
The cathedral is rather stand-offish when it comes to handing out selos; they will only give one to a credenciale that they themselves have issued (since many people start their Caminho Portugues here in Porto, not in Lisbon as we did). Fortunately, just round the corner is the Pilgrim Office, who willingly did the business for us, including an extra, fancy, stamp which we paid a small donation to secure. For both our cathedral and pilgrim office visits we were rather lucky; virtually no queue to get in, but when we came out, there was quite a line for each.
Moving on from the cathdral area takes one into the old town, with its narrow streets and sometimes colourful houses.
Historically there was a Jewish quarter here. In one of Portugal’s rather more inglorious episodes, Jews in the country were either banished, killed or forced to convert to Christianity. There are still marks indicating this forced conversion on some houses where Jews once lived.
One rather charming architectural touch we saw involved the use of decorative swallows
which are loved because they show the good Christian values of faithfulness and mating for life.
Further on from the old town area is the Street of Flowers (Rua das Flores), which is popular with tourists.
(In fact, if you’ll allow me a moan, the whole place is a bit too bloody popular with tourists; it was very crowded almost everywhere we went, with lots of tour groups from the big cruise lines. A prime example of tourism being ruined by tourists.)
One lovely place in this street is the Joalharia de Carmo, which specialises in filigree work.
There’s a filigree staircase being built in gold as an ongoing project
and we could watch specialist filigree work being done there.
At one end of the Rua das Flores is the Sao Bento railway station, which is quite an edifice.
Inside it is (a) fantastically decorated and (b) incredibly crowded (which in fairness is because most of the crowds of people were gawping at the decor, not catching trains).
The final two photographs above show major scenes from Portugal’s history – a chivalric showdown in 1140 at Valdevez, when Afonso Henriques defeated his cousin Alfonso VII of Leon and Castille and secured the independence of Portugal from Spain; and the wedding of King John I and Philippa of Lancaster in 1387, something that cemented the Britain-Portugal alliance. The entire display of around 20,000 tiles was designed and hand-painted by master artist Jorge Colaço over 11 years between 1905 and 1916.
Another significant building nearby is the Clérigos church with its landmark tower.
The Church and Tower are part of an 18th century construction commissioned by the Brotherhood of Clerics, and today house a museum and a space for exhibitions and other events.
One of the most popular Things To See in Porto is the bookshop, Livrari Lello.
It is globally renowned for its breathtaking Art Nouveau and Gothic Revival architecture. Founded in 1906, it features a magnificent crimson winding staircase, intricate wooden carvings, and a stunning stained-glass ceiling. It also has a big queue, for which one has to buy timed entry tickets,
which is why I’m not bringing you any photographs of this stunning sight.
As well as too many bloody tourists, another affliction of Porto that I find a bit annoying is the profusion of street musicians. As soon as you get anywhere near an area popular with tourists you’re bound to fall over someone doing his or her own karaoke. Some of the musicians are actually quite good, but the place is noisy enough as it is without this extra noise pollution. We came across one signal exception to this, near the bookshop.
A charming and eccentric chap was winding the organ, which was decorated with some live doves, and nursing a couple of chickens, who occasionally clucked as a sort of informal percussion department. It was a sort of Magic Roundabout moment – lovely.
After this peregrination around the city, we walked back towards the river, past an area which gave us a good view back over Vila Nova de Gaia.
It’s a bit difficult to see in the photo above, but there are various significant names above many of the buildings shown here – Fonseca, Taylor’s and Sandeman among them. These are among the Port houses that crowd the banks of the river. There are no Port houses in Porto itself; historically the taxes were too high, and the atmospheric conditions not so good for the wine, so they all set up on the south side, in Vila Nova.
On the river, near the bank, you can see a few of the original boats that used to bring the barrels down the river – they are museum pieces now, but others like them are now in use for river cruises.
Our walk back took us past the statue of Henry the Navigator (famous son of John I and Philippa of Lancaster),
and the house in which he was born.
The riverside area – The Ribeira – is another place that’s very popular with tourists and wandering minstrels who refuse to wander off,
but it’s undeniably attractive
and gives a great view of the Luis I bridge.
We completed the walk back to the hotel over the lower level of the bridge. At the far end there was a bit of a buzz, and it centred around a lad who was threatening to jump.
It appears that this is a fairly normal thing; he whipped the crowd up into something approaching a minor frenzy and then signally failed to make an impressive leap when he jumped.
The hotel lift was handy for getting us back to our room. After our time with Claudia, we lunched at the hotel and then pottered round a couple of the sights we’d passed in the morning. There was one more thing to be done, which was to go up to the balcony outside the monastery to see the sunset. Sunset was due at about 1940, so we went up about half an hour beforehand to find that
the same idea had occurred to a lot of others, too. As we waited for the sunset we listened to the inevitable strolling musician (who was reasonably good, to be fair). Jane noticed a good shot that summed things up rather.
The railings were very crowded, but it was possible to squeeze though and take a few photos. It was a pleasant but not epic sunset,
and we eventually left and walked back to the hotel through the somewhat party atmosphere that had developed on this Friday night – a nice buzz to walk through.
We have a full day at leisure tomorrow (yay!). We will (obviously) go for a walk around, but you’ll have to come back to these pages to find out what it was that we walked to.