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Day 23 – Porto: Intermission 2 – playing tourist

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Saturday 19 September 2026 – A full day of leisure lay before us. So, a bit of a lie-in and a decent hotel breakfast over, we went for a walk. Obviously. Our main objective was to do one of the main tourist activities – take a short cruise up and down the Douro river and inspect the bridges that cross it. Fortunately, there is a company that offers such a cruise. Well, actually, there are probably dozens, but we just rocked up to the nearest one on our side of the river, operated by Manos do Douro. There was a 1030 departure, labelled the “6 bridges cruise”, which seemed just the thing, and we were there very conveniently at 1020, so we got on board

and off we went. On a sunny day like today, Porto is exceedingly photogenic,

so we got loads of pictures, including the bridges we went under.  We started off up-river and up-sun, so the best pictures started when we turned and headed back towards the city, when we had the sun behind us.

Ponte de São João, a 1991 railway bridge, replacing the Maria Pia Bridge (q.v.)

Maria Pia Bridge, from 1877. Designed by Gustave Eiffel, and the oldest bridge connecting Gaia and Porto

Infante Dom Henrique Bridge, designed by Adão da Fonseca, opened in 2003 to replace the upper deck traffic of the Luis I Bridge (q.v.)

“Our” bridge, the Luis I Bridge, from 1886, designed by the Belgian engineer Théophile Seyrig, a former business partner of Gustave Eiffel, and now a Unesco World Heritage Site

The Luis I bridge is photographically useful for framing important subjects on the mainland.

The final bridge was quite far downstream.

The Arrábida Bridge, which has a 270-metre span that for some time held the world record for reinforced concrete arch bridges. Designed by engineer Edgar Cardoso, and inaugurated in 1963

Those of you who have stayed awake long enough to have been counting will have noticed that there are only five bridges, and we were sold six. The sixth, the Freixo bridge, is sufficiently far upstream that neither Jane nor I noticed it in order to take a picture of it.

As well as the bridges, there were a few other things to see as well, because, as I say, Porto in the sunshine is a very attractive place.

As you can see, among the pretty pastel houses there’s evidence of what must have been some fairly chunky fortifications at one stage. The Parish Church of Massarelos prominently displays a cross of the Order of Christ (which, as you will remember, is what the Knights Templar morphed into).

There are several parking lots for the river cruise boats, but one seems to attract most of them.

At some time, t, in the future, there may well be a seventh bridge for the cruises to go under. On port and starboard side of the boat, this could be seen.

Interestingly, as we passed, we noticed that the two bridge ends don’t actually point at each other. I hope that Someone Hasn’t Blundered.

We passed a house that prominently featured the Sandeman port logo

which we’d originally thought indicated the location of their port house; but this is on the Porto side, so there must be some other connection. For the real Sandeman house, and why it matters (to us, at least), read on.

As the cruise boat neared its return to its start point, it passed an exhibition of old port boats, the ones that were used to bring the wine down the river in barrels.

There are several of them, bearing the labels of some of the port houses that line the banks near where these are moored. After we disembarked, it seemed a good idea to wander along the quay back towards the port houses in search of coffee. It was a more difficult quest than one might have imagined from the number of eateries and drinkeries along the quays. Most of them were restaurants and not open until midday; the few genuine cafés were, unsurprisingly, crowded and we couldn’t find a seat for a while.  However, because we kept on wandering we came across two golden examples of extreme tourist marketing. Normally these sorts of things are the sorts of things we would avoid, but actually they are both charmingly done, or rather overdone. The first is a sardine shop. You’ll remember that we saw such a thing in Lisbon, and this one was no different

Literally wall-to-wall canned fish – mainly, but by no means exclusively, sardines.

They even offered a tasting.

It was so inviting that I recorded a short walk-round video.

Next door to it is an even more idiosyncratic place, the Casa Portuguesa do Pastel de Bacalhau, dedicated to the codfish cake.

Again, this is not something that would normally interest me, but the building’s interior is very quirky.

According to their website, “The Codfish Cake with Serra da Estrela PDO Cheese was born from the desire to honour the work of the shepherds of Serra da Estrela. It is thanks to them that the sheep produce an extraordinary milk that gives rise to a unique cheese in the world.

“At Casa Portuguesa do Pastel de Bacalhau we celebrate the protagonists of this story by creating the conditions for them to have a dignified life, fairly remunerating their work.”

This was another place for which recording a video was an inviting prospect.

Both places, whilst being sharply commercial and aimed at tourists, managed to be very charming.

Further up the quay was the place where the big RIver Cruise boats were parked – indeed triple-parked. That’s why there were so many punters in the town!

We passed port houses with various familiar names, as we have enjoyed Fonseca, Quinta da Noval, Graham’s, Sandeman’s and so on. There are flags on the quayside bearing all the names,

but the one that interested us the most was Sandeman’s.

It must be 30 years since we went to a Sunday Times wine show. While we were there we passed the Sandeman Port stand, where Graham Sandeman was on duty. It was he who first alerted us to the possibilities of port and tonic made with a medium white port. Given that we were passing his family gaff in Vila Nova de Gaia, it seemed rude not to pop in and lift a glass to the memory, particularly since they had a nice terrace outside in the shade.

If you look carefully, in the distance you can see that house with the Sandeman logo on the side.

After a couple of glasses, for it was very good, we pottered back to the hotel, past where young lads were jumping off the Luis I bridge for pocket money

and spent the rest of the day relaxing and psyching ourselves up for restarting the walking thing tomorrow. The next two days are, you guessed it, official heat wave days, with forecast temperatures of over 30°C – not as ferocious as we’d seen earlier, but still not to be trifled with. So we plan to make a very early start tomorrow, to get 22km of walking out of the way before the worst of the heat.

The Caminho proper starts at the Cathedral, and there are three route options – Central, Littoral and Coastal. These are explained, if you can be bothered, in the Stingy Nomads pages. For the rest of our Caminho we’ll be dodging about a bit between them, but we are starting with the Littoral route; furthermore, we’re going to start outside Porto, at a place called Matosinhos, and walk thence to Vila do Conde. It’ll be a Sunday, so we’re not sure whether we’ll be able to get coffee on the way, but I’ll of course report back. It’ll be hot and sweaty by the end of the walk – wish us luck!

 

Day 21 – Grijó to Porto: Light duties

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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.