Porto, Where the River Does the Work
Starting a no-fly year on the Douro: granite stairs, a rabelo boat that goes nowhere, and the discovery that the cheapest view in the city costs €1.40.
The Douro is not a picturesque river. It is a working one that happens to be beautiful, which is a different and better thing. On my second morning I sat on the Gaia bank for two hours and counted: eleven container barges, four dredgers, one police launch, and a single rabelo — the flat-bottomed wine boat that used to bring barrels down from the terraces — moored permanently in front of a lodge with a logo painted on its sail. It has not moved in years. It is a photograph of itself.
That gap, between the river that works and the river that poses, turned out to be the whole trip in miniature. I came to Porto to start a year of crossing Europe without boarding a single aircraft, and I arrived expecting to be charmed. What actually happened is that I got tired, in the good way, on the stairs.
Porto is a vertical city pretending to be a flat one
Nothing on the map prepares you. The distance from the Ribeira to the Clérigos tower is four hundred metres and roughly seventy vertical ones, delivered as granite steps worn concave in the middle by four centuries of feet. Locals take them at a pace that suggests the stairs are not there. I took eleven days to stop stopping.
The reward for the climbing is a specific kind of light. Porto faces west into the Atlantic and the whole city is faced in glazed tile, so at around six in the evening in February the light comes in low and the buildings hand it back to each other. Azulejo is usually described as decoration. It is closer to infrastructure.
Every guidebook tells you to watch the sunset from the Serra do Pilar. Nobody tells you to turn around and watch the city receive it.
The bridge is a tram, the tram is a warning
Everyone photographs the Dom Luís I bridge. Fewer people walk the upper deck, which carries the metro, has a walkway about a metre wide on either side, and stands sixty metres above the water with a handrail that is more suggestion than argument. Trains pass close enough to move your jacket. I did it four times, which is three times more than necessary.
Tram 1, meanwhile, runs from the Ribeira out to Foz do Douro along the water in a wooden carriage from 1929 that groans on the curves like furniture being moved. It costs €4.20 for a single, which is honestly a lot, and it is the correct amount to pay. Sit on the river side. The line ends where the Douro finally gives up and becomes the Atlantic, at a lighthouse and a row of surf schools and old men fishing off rocks with an air of long-term grievance.
On the actual drinking of port
The lodges across the water in Vila Nova de Gaia sell a tour-and-tasting for €18 to €35 and the tours are fine and largely identical: cool corridors, vast oak balseiros, a man saying the word "oxidative" with great care. Do one. Then stop, and go to a tasca on the Porto side instead, where a glass of ten-year tawny is €3.60 and comes with a small plate of dry-cured presunto and no narrative whatsoever.
The best thing I ate was not port-adjacent. It was a francesinha at a place with fluorescent lighting on Rua do Bonjardim: ham, steak, sausage, melted cheese, a fried egg, and a sauce built on beer and stock that is poured over the whole assembly until the plate is a shallow lake. €11.75. Structurally, it is a sandwich only in the sense that a shipwreck is a boat. I could not finish it and thought about it for the next three countries.
What starting slowly actually feels like
I had budgeted five days for Porto and stayed nine. That was not spontaneity; it was arithmetic. When the plane is off the table, every extra city costs six to eleven hours of daylight you will spend sitting still, so the calculus flips. Depth becomes cheaper than breadth. You stop asking what else is there and start asking what is here on a Tuesday morning.
On a Tuesday morning, in Porto, there is the Bolhão market, half of it rebuilt in concrete and glass and half of it still run by women who will tell you your choice of tomato is wrong. There is an entire street of shops that sell nothing but buttons and thread. There is a bookshop with a queue outside it and a €8 entry fee, and one street away, four bookshops with no queue at all.
The Sud Express leaves for the French border in nine days. I am going to spend most of them on stairs.