Simply adouroble

PORTO, OCTOBER 2024

How about a holiday where the whole family spend four nights in a new city not too far away? After some discussion we settled on Porto, and a light and spacious apartment near the city centre was booked where all eleven of us could comfortably fit. Porto’s airport is modern and not far out of town – the ride in was swish, smooth and direct, on the city’s spotless new metro system. The only downside was that it’s based on rather narrow articulated trams with a distinct shortage of seats.

The big headache was not the trams, but the tickets. Porto has the Andante card. The idea is that you buy one of these and load it up with journeys (called titles for some reason). But it’s one Adante per person. So loading these things up is a nightmare if you are doing it for eleven people. Thankfully, the tripeiros are a patient lot and didn’t mind queuing up behind an exasperated Brit shoving coins and banknotes into a ticket machine. Andante is of course a musical term indicating a piece should be played quite slowly – which seems quite fitting.

By the way, the people of Porto are called tripeiros not because they make lots of trips on the metro, but that in 1415, when Infante Dom Henrique’s armada set off to invade part of Africa, their ancestors let him take all their fresh meat. That left them to consume little else but tripe. Putting an armada under the control of an infant seems a bad idea to me – almost as bad as volunteering to eat tripe.

Getting round and about was straightforward as practically everyone speaks at least a bit of English. “Obrigado” in return (or “obrigada” if you are female) goes a long way. It is rather embarrassing when virtually every sign you encounter is in English as well as Portuguese, but perhaps that’s something to do with Portugal being our oldest ally.

On our first full day we set out from the flat and headed generally downhill through interesting streets overlooked by attractive old buildings, until we reached the cathedral – Se do Porto – which stands on high ground overlooking the river Douro. From the outside it looks rather like a fortress, with high blank walls and castellated parapets, but go inside and the contrast is extraordinary. The baroque splendour of the high altar is astonishing. A dark stairway off the cloisters leads up to the top of one of the two towers and gives a fine view over the hilly city and across to Gaia on the far side of the river.

From there we wondered down to the riverside and crossed the remarkable Luiz 1 bridge. The bridge was opened in 1886 and allows traffic to cross at river level between Porto and Gaia on a lower deck, and also at a higher level to link the hilltop of Porto with the hilltop of Gaia. Its similarity in design to the Eiffel tower is because its designer was Gustav Eiffel’s partner, Theophile Seyrig.

No visit to Porto is complete without a tour round one of the port houses. They are in Gaia on the opposite bank of the Douro from Porto itself. We went to Ramos Pinto, which is on the quayside. Port became important as a drink when the Napoleonic wars interrupted the supply of French wine to England. The longer transit of wine from Portugal meant that much of it went off before it reached Blighty, so the idea of fortifying it with another alcohol emerged and led to a new and important industry. The grapes are grown in the Douro valley and brought down to be nurtured into basically three kinds of port: white port, which is drunk as a dry, crisp aperitive and with seafood; ruby port, which goes well with richly flavoured foods like cheese and charcuterie; and tawny port, which complements sweet desserts.

Our tour was conducted by a wonderfully knowledgeable lady who managed to compress a four-hour exposition into forty minutes. So I’m a bit sketchy on the technicalities. Up until the late nineteenth century port production was dominated by a number of well-known British firms, like Taylor’s and Cockburn’s. Ramos Pinto decided that some Portuguese competition was warranted and he made his mark by outrageous advertising, in a deeply Catholic country. One of his posters showed a naked Adam and Eve, with the serpent tempting them not with an apple, but a glass of his port. What a cheeky chap.

There is a new centre in Gaia called WOW (World of Wine) which the port-swigging members of the party didn’t visit so I can’t comment on it. However, those that did said it was huge fun, with a museum of chocolate, and a museum of rosé wine which featured a ball pool full of pink balls to represent the bubbles in the sparkling stuff! They all jumped in!

Day two began with a ride on a very old, and quite small, tram along the riverside west of the city to Foz. A very fancy club-style bistro set us up with coffees and fruit juices and we headed to the beach. Porto has a decent stretch of beaches, some small with rock pools in sheltered bays and others wide and spawning rollers that attract the surfers. And if you paddle or swim it’s in the Atlantic Ocean. Head due west and you’ll wind up in New York!

The arty highlight of the trip was a ride out to Serralves, a large estate on the outskirts of town, formerly the residence of a very wealthy local family. The estate includes a spacious gallery, done in marble, with lots of opportunity to suffer serious injury – slippery, dark stairwells with no banisters, raised walkways with unprotected drops on to stone floors, that kind of thing. But the main exhibition was a charming (and also highly thought-provoking) show about children’s games around the world. Hopscotch and conkers for Britain, but a poignant scene of boys dressed up as an army patrol in Ukraine, stopping drivers to see their ID, and Rubi, a fascinatingly complex finger football game from Congo using little sticks in the ground and marbles.

Turning to matters of the table the fare in Porto was unremarkable, but it was reasonable, reasonably priced and served by welcoming, friendly staff. One night I had Portuguese beef with chips and salad. Two sizeable pieces of meat – so it was probably a relief that the ‘chips’ were crisps and not a pile of the thick cut sort. There was a pleasant salmon salad by the beach and a decent buffet at the art gallery. Perhaps the fresh pizza we had on the third night was rather over-cheesed though.

Oh, and I must mention pasteis de nata – the traditional Portuguese custard tarts that are ubiquitous. Over the street from our apartment was a large fruit and vegetable market (so crisply clean it looked like every tomato had been individually rinsed and polished) and beside it was a bustling café where a very determined-looking woman took a pillow-sized piece of dough and worked it and worked it before feeding it into a large piece of kit that cut out and baked the tartlets. One of those, fresh from the oven, with a coffee, was sublime.

The last treat of the trip was a boat ride on the river, offering the experience of seeing all six of the bridges that span this stretch of the Douro. The tripeiros love their bridges – even mundane motorway spans are both technically audacious and architecturally beautiful. The inspiration was undoubtedly the Ponte Maria Pia bridge opened in 1877. It was also designed by Theophile Seyrig. A bold wrought iron arch carried the railway from Lisbon, its slenderness belying the strength to carry a train safely, sixty metres above the river. Sadly, since it was replaced by the stunning Ponte de São João bridge in 1991 it has remained closed – surely a solid candidate for a spectacular pedestrian and cycle crossing.
Some of the other bridges are also remarkable. The Luiz 1 bridge had the world’s longest steel span when it opened; the Ponte da Arrábida boasted the world’s longest reinforced concrete span when it was inaugurated in 1963. Meanwhile, the Ponte Infante Dom Henrique of 2003 has one of the shallowest concrete arches anywhere. So lots of wow moments for fans of spans.

Soon after it was time to head home, but only after one last stress-inducing encounter with the Andante ticket machine. After that, coping with an hour’s delay to the flight back was a breeze.

Quiz answer: This is the door to the female toilet. I realised just in time! Some designers can be just a tiny bit too clever.

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