Thursday 17 September 2026 – With only 13km to cover today, we had once again the luxury of a leisurely departure from the very pleasant Couto Rural. Lourdes had prepared a decent breakfast for us (we didn’t tell her about the extra yoghurt we’d bought in the supermarket and consumed furtively pre-breakfast in our room) and was prepared to drive us out to the Caminho trail, which was delightful of her. But we walked – it was only just over 1km, and it was a lovely morning. You can tell from the length of our shadows that the sun had well risen by the time we got under way.

There seems to be a Hispanic way of doing electrical wiring that looks slightly dodgy to our UK eyes – here, in Spain and in South America one sees coils of wire festooning the electricity poles. It generally seems to work OK, though, but we did see one very interesting take on wiring continuity.

The walk carried on for a while through pleasant neighbourhoods

one of which featured a coffee stop. We hadn’t gone our usual qualifying distance of 5km, but since we had a leisurely schedule for the day, we looked in for a cup of meia de leite.

It was one of those places where the town bore was holding forth at great length and volume.

The neighbourhood of Perosinho has a small but well-formed church

and a substantial espiguero (handy for storing stuff), just by the bins (handy for throwing stuff away).

The word espigueiro means “cob store”. Its root is the Portuguese word espiga, which means an ear of corn, or a cob. They are traditional granaries built to store and dry corn as well as other crops such as wheat, rye, and barley. One of the houses in the neighbourhood had a rather cute letterbox to match.

After about 3km, we turned off tarmac onto a track which is another stretch of Roman road;

the guard cats let us through eventually. It’s rather better surfaced than the stretch we walked yesterday.

We had, then, about 4km of pleasant woodland track, through which sometimes the Roman surface showed through and sometimes it didn’t.

We passed a waymark which we’d seen a lot of.

The blue arrow is the sign for the Caminho de Fatima, just as the yellow one is for Santiago, but we wondered what the JO meant that we’d seen a few times elsewhere. The JO is short for Jornada, an accepted day stage on one of the various routes that lead from various places in Portugal to Fatima. The Santiago and Fatima Caminho trails coincide in a lot of places, but there’s no formal connection between the two. What we’ve been seeing is the waymarking for the Northern Route of the Fatima Caminho.

The track passes an adventure playground

where people can indulge in paintballing and such. There are also elevated pathways among the trees; whether one is allowed to launch aerial paintball attacks, I don’t know.

The track led us over a hill, and the downward continuation was a bit tricky in parts

but otherwise it was a very pleasant  interlude in the walk, which I had expected to be entirely on roads and through suburbs. All good things must come to an end, and so we eventually came to “civilisation” at the other end of the woodland

and walked down and over a bridge into a busy suburb of Porto.

I’ve circled in red the point where the woodland track came to an end.

From this point, the walk was simply a largely gentle downhill stroll on the streets through Vila Nova de Gaia, the suburb of Porto south of the river. There are plenty of bars and cafés, so we stopped a couple of times more before we got to our hotel, since we were in no hurry.

One of the underpasses we walked through had been nicely decorated

and we found a bit of branding reuse that I doubt the filmmakers would sanction.

We were on Avenida da Republica, a major thoroughfare, leading directly down to the river; a tram service operates along the middle of it,

and some of the buildings by its side have been decorated.

Vila Nova de Gaia has an impressive town hall

and there’s another distinguished-looking building nearby, Casa Barbot, which is the HQ of the Vila Nova de Gaia department of heritage, culture and tourism.

It is, we read, the only example of Art Nouveau in Vila Nova de Gaia.

Near the river is a park, from which you can see the very imposing monastery Mosteiro da Serra do Pilar

which, going by the number of people in front of it, offers a commanding view over the river. The park itself offers a pretty decent view, but there are enough things that get in the way to make it difficult to get an overall picture of what is a very attractive waterfront. There is one spot from which one can construct a panorama; it really is a delightful view.

Also delightful was the fact that our hotel was right there.

So strictly speaking, we’re in Vila Nova de Gaia, not in Porto, which begins on the other side of the river. We went in to their reception area which looks dead posh

but which actually smelt not a little of drains. Our room wasn’t yet available, and so we went to the hotel restaurant for a spot of (surprisingly reasonably-priced) lunch, which we took on a terrace with a fantastic view over the river

although conversation had to pause occasionally when a train went over the bridge. This is the Ponte Luis I bridge, a double-deck affair spanning the Douro river; the upper level is pedestrian and metro and connects directly to Porto city centre;  the lower level links to the waterfront and carries vehicular traffic and pedestrians.

The hotel itself is a remarkable creation. The reception, at the upper level of the bridge, is on the 14th floor (of 15 – I think the top floor is reserved for very expensive suites) and the restaurant on the 10th. Intervening floors have various bars, and below the restaurant are the floors with the hotel bedrooms – we’re on the 6th floor, for example, and have a pretty similar view to the photo above. This might be rather convenient – the hotel lifts can get us from upper to lower bridge level without having to walk up all those tedious hills.

After lunch our room had become ready and so we settled in. I popped off to do some laundry – these things are important, y’know – in a nearby laundrette which was very well-equipped and easy to use. And we have two full days to experience Porto, starting with a guided tour tomorrow morning. I must say, I’m rather looking forward to looking around.