Category: Spain and Portugal, June 2022

Porto, a Douro River cruise on AmaDouro, and Madrid (with side trips to Segovia and Toledo). Lots and lots of photos.

A Private Tour of Porto

We’ve had good luck with Tours by Locals and today was no exception. We took the Discover Porto Highlights Private Tour with our guide, Ricardo M., and we got a wonderful introduction to the city and might have even walked enough to make up for the Pastéis de Nata that Ricardo treated us to at our coffee stop!

Ricardo met us at 9:30 in our hotel lobby and we took off for our first stop a few hundred meters away, the [Sāo Bento Train Station(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/São_Bento_railway_station). We’d walked by there yesterday evening but hadn’t gone in, so we were surprised by the beautiful tile murals on the interior walls showing significant events in Portuguese history.

Our next stop was the grounds of the Sé do Porto (the Porto Cathedral); we saw this interesting not-road sign as walked there.

The Cathedral is old – it can be dated back to the 12th Century, though parts are much newer. There are other museums nearby, like the Museum of Painted Glass (we didn’t have time to visit it), and there are lots of houses and apartments in the area. The owners are required to keep the exteriors mostly unchanged, but Ricardo told us that the interiors were quite modern.

The Cathedral, like much of Porto, is decorated in porcelain tile.

We walked across the Douro River on the Dom Luis I Bridge – it’s for pedestrians and the Metro, no cars. The view was wonderful.

The other side of the river is a different city, Vila Nova de Gaia. It’s the home of many Port houses and is more populous than Porto. We stopped at the grounds of the Monastery of Serra do Pilar to enjoy the view of Porto proper.

We walked back across the bridge and visited the temporary Bolhāo Market, where we bought what I suspect will only be the first chocolate of the trip. The market itself is being rebuilt a few blocks away and will be enormous; even the temporary market had an overwhelming number of food stalls, mostly fresh fish and produce. No photos, sorry!

I’ve only gotten through the first hour-and-a-half of our day, it’s after 11pm and I’m exhausted, so I’m going to stop for the night. Boa noite!

We reach Porto

British Airways has weird seat arrangements in business class on their transatlantic flights. I’d made the best guess I could from the seat map, but Diane and I were separated by a divider – however, there was an unrelated person who would have been right next to me all night. He was happy to swap seats with Diane so we could be together instead.

The food was good (we both had the cod) and I liked the Italian white wine; the Pinot was ok, too. The before-dinner drinks were forgettable; the Graham’s Six Grapes Reserve Ruby Port was very nice.

When we landed, we had to wait a couple of minutes for a gate – and about 20 minutes for the jet bridge to connect to the airplane. People with short connections were not very happy. We came into Terminal 5 and had to take the bus to Terminal 3 for our flight to Porto; getting through security in T3 was not too bad (and would have been easier if I’d listened more carefully and taken off my Apple Watch before going through the metal detector!).

The BA lounge in T3 is not as nice as the one at SFO; we were hungry and ordered the Moroccan Meat Balls. They took about 30 minutes to arrive and weren’t worth the wait; at least they didn’t cost extra. I was really surprised that they didn’t have any desserts available, unlike the situation in SFO. Or even candy – SFO had Matlow’s hard candy (transparent fruity), which I really liked. They also had Sperlari Italian hard candy, also good.

The flight to Porto was delayed because someone who’d checked luggage decided not to travel and they had to pull their bags. Once we got into the air, the flight was smooth. Clearing health screening in Porto took about 15 seconds – Diane didn’t even have to give the guard her vaccination card and he barely looked at either of our test results before slapping a blue wristband on us, giving us the freedom of the city (after we cleared immigration, of course).

The PortoBay Flores hotel is on a pedestrianized street, which gave our taxi driver some challenges – he had to wait for tourists to finish taking pictures more than once! Our room is in the new part of the hotel and has a great view over Porto.

We unpacked a little and set out for a light walk and dinner. This part of Porto is filled with little restaurants – we couldn’t get into the first one we tried and almost went back to the hotel bistro, but we stumbled across La Salumeria Porto and went there instead; I enjoyed it. Fortunately, they had a few vegetarian options on their menu.

After dinner, we walked the length of our street (about 200 meters) and found a wonderful gelato shop, Glanni. The servers were helpful and friendly – one even took a photo of Diane and me outside with their giant cone!

We’d had enough for the first night after a long day of travel and went back to our room; the view at night isn’t bad, either!