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In writing these posts I use the photos I took that day to jog my memory about the places we visited. Sometimes that’s not enough, so I go back to my credit card charges to see where we bought tickets to.
But, apparently, for our first full day in Porto…we didn’t visit any particular place :). Mostly because we spent the morning and early afternoon doing laundry. I’m now a veteran of both Italian and Portuguese laundromats! I found the latter easier to use, as they included automatic soap dispensers1. We still had a lot of fun and enjoyed a simple walkabout later in the day.
Porto is currently undergoing a massive building boom, with refurbishing projects and new construction all over the place. In fact, the locals joke the official bird of Porto is currently the construction crane.
This first picture was taken near a tourist info place where we went to buy metro/bus passes. That turned out to involve not one, but two visits to the tourist information center…because you can only buy the passes in rail or metro stations, and the one we needed was being so thoroughly rebuilt we didn’t recognize it was downtown Porto’s analog of Grand Central Station.
After finally getting our transit passes, we decided to revisit the Ponte Luis I bridge for a more thorough look-see. Along the way we saw a lot of neat older buildings…and a humorous statue.
The latter illustrates something we learned after being in Porto for a week: it’s a more lighthearted city than Lisbon, perhaps because one of its main industries involves world-famous alcoholic beverages.
As you approach the bridge from the Porto side you can see the Mosteiro de Santo Agostinho da Serra do Pilar (“Monastery of Serra do Pilar”) off in the distance. In addition to having a beautiful church (which, unfortunately, was closed during our visit), the site played an important role in the war to drive Napoleon and the French out of Portugal.
Interestingly, the monastery is on the Gaia side of the Douro River. Meaning, I think, it was under secular control (the Catholic Church controlled Porto, but not Gaia) when the monastery was built).
You have to be careful not to get sideswiped by the metro while taking photos on the bridge (fortunately, vehicles are not allowed on the top deck). But the views are worth it.
Being pretty centrally located, you can see almost all of Porto and Gaia from the bridge.
There’s a lot of boat traffic on the Douro. Interestingly, we never saw anything other than tour boats (which are very popular).
Yet the grapes to be fermented into port must get shipped via the river from the Douro Valley, off in the east.
While not as hilly as Lisbon, Porto has its own share of steep traverses, several of which are served by funiculars.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get to ride any of them during our visit. With that, it was back to a tasty dinner and our sumptuous hotel.
We were also entering the “let’s relax occasionally on this vacation, okay?” phase of traveling. We’ve learned that two weeks is about our limit for a trip, regardless of how much fun stuff there is to see and do, and the second week always sees less action. ↩
