Porto

Portugal

PORTUGAL’S CREATIVE SOUL ON THE DOURO

In 1415, by local legend, the citizens of Porto handed over the entirety of their meat to Henry the Navigator's fleet bound for Ceuta and kept only the tripe for themselves. The Portuenses have been known as Tripeiros ever since, and tripas à moda do Porto remains on the lunch menus of the older taverns. Whether literal or not, the story tells you something useful: Porto sends its best out to the world and gets on cheerfully with the offal. There is no false ceremony here.

Porto sits high on a granite shelf where the Douro meets the Atlantic, and is built in the same granite. The historic centre has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996, an unusually generous inscription that also takes in the Dom Luís I bridge and the Serra do Pilar monastery across the river in Vila Nova de Gaia. The skyline is a working argument between centuries: the Romanesque Sé glowering from its hill; the Baroque bell tower of the Clérigos, the tallest in Portugal and the homecoming sailor's first sight of land; the nineteenth-century iron and azulejo theatricality of São Bento railway station with its twenty thousand tiles; and a measured contemporary current in the manner of the Porto School architects Álvaro Siza Vieira and Eduardo Souto de Moura. Rem Koolhaas's Casa da Música, dropped into the Boavista roundabout in 2005, is the only building in the city that genuinely shouts. The rest of Porto carries its history at conversational volume.

The painted townhouses you have heard about, in lemon and peach and faded turquoise and bruised pink, are largely domestic rather than monumental. They climb the medieval lanes of Ribeira down to the riverfront, follow the Miragaia waterfront where Porto's old Jewish quarter once spilled beyond the city walls, and turn into the merchant grandeur of Massarelos as the river bends west toward the sea. Walk it slowly. Porto is a city of staircases (the Escadas dos Guindais, the Escadas da Vitória of the medieval Judiaria do Olival, the Escadas dos Clérigos), and it is best read by the foot rather than the wheel.

The Port trade made the modern city. British merchants set up in the seventeenth century, lived at the still-functioning British Factory House, and quietly turned the upstream Douro Valley into one of the world's oldest demarcated wine regions. The barrel-lined lodges in Gaia hold the consequence today: Taylor's, Graham's, Sandeman, alongside Portuguese houses such as Niepoort and Ramos Pinto, often making the more interesting wine. The most photogenic way to take all of this in is from the Gaia side at golden hour, with a chilled white port and tonic in hand and Gustave Eiffel's Dona Maria Pia railway bridge framing the composition. The water is the same colour as the wine.

Porto eats well, slowly, and without pretence. The francesinha is eaten as gravely as a Sunday roast; bacalhau comes in its hundred dignified preparations; sardines are grilled on cobbled side streets in summer. Livraria Lello, the neo-Gothic bookshop on Rua das Carmelitas, was photographed by every visitor before it had a queue, and is still worth the wait. The Mercado do Bolhão has at last reopened after a decade of restoration. The historic cafés (Majestic, Guarany, A Brasileira) are still where the city writes itself.

What draws people to Porto in the end is not its prettiness, which it possesses but does not particularly cultivate. It is the city's working refusal to be precious. Heritage is repurposed rather than embalmed, design enters by the side door via age-old crafts, the Douro River does the rest.

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