Porto 14 - 19 April, 2025
- Lydia Padilla
- Apr 30
- 5 min read
So, I promise that not everything in Porto was about drinking. Promise.
But after looking at the pics it looks like that's all we did. It is WAY too easy to enjoy the wine and the port in Portugal, though, since an excellent bottle of wine is under $10! And on our travel budget (what's a budget??? - haha!) that makes it SO much easier to order the 3rd bottle. I don't remember having that large a selection of Portuguese wines back in StL, Port yes, but not a lot of wines. If you find them on the shelves, get them...they're excellent!
Definitely book a trip up the Duoro Valley if you're here. In terms of beauty, I felt it was prettier that Napa (cheaper by far) and Tuscany and the optional boat ride down the river could be beautiful. Ours was during a steady rain so the boat wasn't as spectacular as it could have been...still beautiful, though.
This trip was special as we got to see one of our oldest friends, Ellen. There aren't too many things more comforting than Ellen's voice - she has that syrupy Mississippi accent that just makes you relax and smile. But hearing her try to say Spanish and Portuguese words with that accent is wonderful, especially after a wine cruise! To be fair, hearing any of us try to pronounce Portuguese words was comical - it's definitely a hard language for me!
Ellen and Bob and Bob's daughter Chelsea and husband Kevin "won" a week's stay in Porto at a charity auction and invited us to meet them. The place was wonderful and actually had floor space. After three months of mostly staying in shoe box hotel rooms, having a place to spread out on the floor was wonderful. Seriously, some of the hotel rooms we have been in have a foot on either side of the bed, they're that small. Even better, the place had a washing machine - no dryer - but after doing shower laundry almost exclusively it was nice to have some clothes cleaned with real soap and not shampoo. I've included a few pics that show the drying methods we MacGyver'ed to get everything dry.
Seeing friends on this part of the trip has been wonderful and re-invigorating. We got into a lazy habit of not motivating until late morning, so when we are with friends it gets us back to productive schedules (sort of - #lazyassretirementlife) Oddly, most of our friends are really early morning people and we're really early afternoon people. Also, we're not trying to pack as much into everyday as we used to when we had to get back to the office, so it's great to get on others' schedules and be a bit more productive. Ellen also had an old StL/lafayette Square friend (Jay) that is now living in Portugal who joined us for a couple of days - it was great meeting and spending time with someone with similar ambitions (living abroad) and who is a bit ahead of us in the process...makes us feel MUCH more comfortable in our decisions. Plus it gives us a new friend to free-load off of in a beautiful place!!! (just joking, Jay...not really, we'll be there in a few weeks!)
Porto is an excellent city and full of beautiful walks, hikes and uphill climbs. It's very hilly and, like the rest of Portugal, the streets are made up of mosaic marble and can be a bit slippery when wet. Hiking shoes are a must. The city is centered around the river, so the closer you get to the river the better, at least from a tourist site standpoint. Our apartment was roughly a Km from the river and was about a 15-20 minute walk downhill. The walk back uphill was even quicker, though, when you walk INTO an Uber and drive back.
In terms of time to spend in Porto, you can easily spend two days/two nights and see the city, but I'd prefer an extra day or two to allow a lot of strolling time. I'd also like to have gone to Foz, the seaside town adjoining Porto, but we missed it on this trip. I'd also strongly recommend a harbor boat tour followed by a lunch/dinner on the Baixo/Gaia side of the river near the marina boat docks. There are some really cool little seafood restaurants that all have outdoor grills - this was some of the freshest fish we've found anywhere on the trip. We always try to find the local markets and Porto has an excellent city market that was recently renovated - Mercado do Bolhao. It's nice to grab a glass of wine and wander the aisles and stalls, sampling cheese and sweets along the way.
The highlight of the trip for me, after being able to spend time with friends, was the winery trip to the Duoro Valley. Chelsea found an excellent tour that bussed us from Porto to some wineries a couple of hours up the river. The tour included a stop in Amarante, one of those amazingly beautiful and quaint little river cities that the locals DON'T want you to know about. Funnily, Amarante is known for their St. Gonzalo cakes, based on a Portuguese myth about fertility, unity and fidelity - look it up here -> (https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-phallic-cakes-became-the-mascot-of-a-conservative-portuguese-town). With only a 30 minute stop in the town to do a quick wander and find a bathroom, it was comical how many little phallus references, signs, cakes, etc. we saw. Apparently there is another city on the other side of the mountains dedicated to the women's anatomy. I tried to envision what a joint festival between the two towns might look like. Probably good this stop was before we started hitting the wineries or my internal musings might have become external musings and gotten me in trouble.
The tour included a stop at Favaios, a Port cooperative that worked with hundreds of local grape growers and then a stop at a large manufacturer, Quinta da Roeda, which I've "enjoyed" before. Driving through the valley I was amazed at the beauty and the sheer amount of labor that goes into the harvest here. I feel that it easily blows Napa away in terms of beauty, and that's saying a lot. The vineyards are all on steep mountains/hills that require hand maintenance, with no machinery. With vineyards as far as you can see the amount of outside labor they have to employ, typically immigrant labor from India/Sri Lanka, each year is massive. We learned that, for a select few of the wines, they still employ a typical grape stomping to release the juices. We got invited back to participate in the grape stomping but I suspect that was not born from them recognizing my incredibly strong soccer/karate legs and feet but rather them looking for free labor. Either way, I'm not sure I'd like to drink wine that MY feet had touched.
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