It would be easy to visit Porto just for its bridges or Porto Caves or its blue tiled churches or its cathedral or its many staggering panoramas or its statues or just its train station or its pastries and other food or the stairways or winding alleys in hillside historical districts or its gorgeous sunsets visible from the various hilltops/bridges and more… but the combination of these is breathtakingly amazing.
Porto’s airport is smallish but stylish with gleaming new, marble floors, stainless steel and loads of flying concrete.
Twenty minutes later driving SE through progressively older and prettier parts of Porto, we arrive at our hotel, Arte… Ricardo and a young lady named Patricia check us in to Room 210. It’s contemporary and spacious. The endless supply of high pressure hot water could feed a fire station and heat a Turkish bath. I’m anxious to get going before I fall asleep! It’s 12:15 pm.
Anyone would find Porto really beautiful, charming, and interesting. It’s an architectural, cultural and aesthetic marvel. The entire city center is a UNESCO world heritage site. It’s like Quebec City in size, geography, color and feel, but warmer. “Much warmer,” echoes Patricia. And I’ve heard it’s making many rankings as a top or even THE top city to visit in all of Europe.
There are rivers on flats. Think London, Paris, Calcutta. Then there are cities on river bluffs like Quebec City, Chattanooga and Istanbul. Thus is Porto. Dominating it are twin rocky 250 to 300 foot tall stone promontories facing each other like small fraternal twin Gibraltars across the Douro River about four miles from the Atlantic Ocean.
Six lofty bridges, soaring monuments of grace, strength and beauty, tether the two sides at the crowns. Two earlier bridges are gone. One, the Ponte das Barcas (bridge of barges) at the center of town collapsed under the weight of locals fleeing from Porto south to Gaia ahead of Napoleon’s troops in March 1809, killing “thousands.” The other was a suspension bridge erected in the 1840s or so. Two stone pillars atop very large stone foundations on either side of the Duoro River still survive. Now one foundation is an outdoor café chock full of people, the other’s a tranquil park under the trees and above the river.
Of the six current bridges, Dom Luis I, erected above the ghost of Ponte das Barcas, is most famous and was designed by a student of Gustave Eiffel. Its lower level serves vehicles and pedestrians and the upper light rail and pedestrians. The views from both are superb.
Porto’s oldest bridge is Ponte Maria Pia. It’s down river and was designed by Gustave Eiffel. It was his first significant project. Later he designed some tall tower in Paris whose name I forget. Other bridges were built between 1963 and 2002. At least two are beige white concrete with impressively long and high spans. It’s easy to admire all six on an inexpensive hour-long Douro River ferry rides.
Porto is a tight stacked collection of churches, Moorish castle walls, Renaissance palatial, Beaux Arts and Belle Epoch structures all connected by narrow multi-story residential buildings that together reach all the way down to the Douro. From its crowns, the city perches on bluffs that decrease in height going west until the Atlantic Ocean two miles away. But to the east, the crowns continue in a tall and proud canyon of sorts, for maybe five miles.
Narrow churches are the Oreo filling between other buildings. The year 1394 is engraved on one. Thus Porto has been dense for the hundreds of years or the churches wouldn’t be so narrow. Porto’s buildings are famous for their exterior tiles, a tradition passed down from the Moorish days when iconography was forbidden. It seems like all of Porto’s churches have tiles on the exterior and interior too. They’re usually blue. Some are the same: geometric patterns that repeat from one tile to the other. Others depict painted scenes spread across hundreds of tiles.
