Adventures in Europe: Porto, Portugal

From Vienna, we had a (not so) lovely Ryanair flight to Porto on Wednesday.

We took the metro from the airport and checked in at our hotel.

We are going to start walking the camino on Saturday, so our first stop in Porto was the cathedral to get our pilgrim credentials.

Porto is built on several hills above the Douro River; the cathedral is atop on of the hills, and these are the views of the city and river from up there.

With our cathedral tour done and credentials secured, we descended to the river via little, meandering alleyways.

And we emerged, just like that, at the river! There are many restaurants, bars, shops, boat launches and so on down here and they have done a nice job with it.

We had a drink and enjoyed the gorgeous evening by the water as the sun set.

We ascended from the river via funicular rather than walk the steep alleys; the funicular has this view of the iconic Ponte Luiz I.

We ate dinner by our hotel. I tried Porto's famous Francesinha, which is basically a ham sandwich baked with cheese on top and in a tomato and beer sauce, eaten with a knife and fork. Apparently its origins are from when Napoleon was besieging the city and cooks had to get creative when it came to meal preparation. More interesting than delicious, I would say, but definitely unique. Diana had cod, which Porto is also famous for (later we were told the Portuguese say "there are 1,000 ways to serve cod").

Yesterday, while we did laundry, we sat outside of this place, which serves pastel de bacalhau, or cod fritters in English. I was enjoying a coffee, but when Diana joined me she went inside and came out not only with a fritter to share, but a glass of port to go with it! Well, it was almost noon...

After laundry, cod fritter, and port, we went for lunch at a lovely little restaurant where the server was very nice about explaining the food and telling us a little about Porto. We told him that our next stop was to tour a port wine cellar, and he suggested Taylor's as the best option (there are probably about a dozen wine cellars you can tour,).

The wine cellars are not in Porto proper, but rather across the river in Vila Nova de Gaia. So from lunch we walked down to the river again.

For three euro you can take a water taxi across the river. This is both a convenient way to cross the river and provides some wonderful views from out on the water.

Vila Nova de Gaia has recently invested significantly in transitioning away from actually being the wine transportation hub it had been for centuries to being a tourist destination--they have branded it the "World of Wine." They now ship the wine from further down river where they had the space to develop a more modern port.

Once across the river, we walked up to Taylor's (past this impressive rabbit!).

The wine houses are mostly English in origin and go back centuries, with Taylor's being one of the oldest (since 1692).

They have set up a really great self-guided tour that is incredibly informative about port wine.

The tour includes samples of two of Taylor's ports.

They have a variety of fowl roaming the garden, including this beautiful fellow who was fairly aggressive about looking for food!

After our Taylor's tour, Diana went to a chocolate museum (chocolate and port is a classic pairing!), but I was toured-out and instead went down to the river for a coffee.

Once Diana rejoined me and we were finished enjoying the Vila Nova de Gaia side of the river, we took the cable car from down by the river to up to bridge level.

From the cable car stop you can easily walk out onto the bridge.

The bridge is a lovely place to watch the sunset.

We ended up at nice little place by the hotel for dinner. Once of the things we ordered that excited me was this appetizer which they called something like "make it yourself;" they gave us a bunch of ingredients and we could put it together however we saw fit. Those are sardines in the can, which Porto is famous for as well.

This morning before leaving Porto we stopped by the famous Lello bookstore, which is so famous there is a queue and you need to buy tickets!

The bookstore has Harry Potter associations, and this staircase in particular is a real attraction.

The bookstore is (obviously) beautiful (look at the ceiling skylight!) . . . 

. . . but unfortunately the experience has been mostly ruined by all the tourists. Of course, I was one of them, but I was actually interested in books and not Instagram selfies. Despite the chaos (you literally get pushed around so that people can get their preferred selfie angles), Lello has an interesting special feature on the upper floor featuring Nobel prize winning authors, including Portugal's very own Jose Saramago.

The ticket you purchase to visit Lello is also a voucher if you make a purchase, so I went ahead and bought a translated Saramago novel that interested me.