Exploring Portugal – Beautiful Porto

Our trip to Portugal would not have been complete without a visit to its second-largest city, Porto. We absolutely loved Porto and it is the city we are dying to get back to after just a few weeks away. Here’s a bit of what we saw and did while in Porto.

Getting to Porto

You can get to Porto by train, car, or bus. We opted to take the train, as my husband, Graham, is a huge fan of public transportation. One of the couples we met on a wine tour told us they were headed down to Lisbon via private car that was taking them to a few stops, like Coimbra or Óbidos along the way (both places you can easily get to via train as well).

We found the train to be quite comfortable. There was plenty of room for our bags and few stops along the way. Most of the scenic view along the way were farms. You get some glimpses of the ocean, but the best part is when you’re just getting into Porto. The landscape opens up and suddenly you are enjoying a view of Porto and the Douro River from above. It is so beautiful I was too enthralled to remember to take a picture. So, let me just show you what Porto’s São Bento station looks like when you arrive there.

Bolhão Market

Here in Madison, WI we have an awesome farmer’s market on Saturday mornings that takes up the entire square around our Capitol building. Each week you can buy cheese curds, baked goods, and whatever fresh produce is in season that Saturday. I thought we had it made.

In Porto, you can go to the open air, but covered Bolhão Market six days a week. It’s open all day and they have fish, meat, cheese, produce, plants, olive oil, gelato, spices, crafts, wine, and a dozen other things. Six. Days. A. Week. My God, this market is heaven. Not only that, but there’s a little stand selling glasses of wine and you can wander between the stalls for as long as you want, sipping wine and making fresh purchases. If we lived in Porto, we would come every week day.

We ended up getting a lovely bottle of olive oil and 200 grams each of paella spice and shawarma spice (something we have trouble finding at home) for 15 euros. That is an amazing price compared to the few strands of saffron you can get at Costco here, for around $20.

Majestic Café & Lello Bookshop

Near the Bolhão Market is the Majestic Café. It is an ornate coffee shop dating back to the 1920’s with a style to match. Getting a table here can be somewhat difficult, but we managed to walk up to it at 10am on a weekday morning and get right in. This café is a fun place to visit, but be aware that you will pay higher prices as it is a tourist hot spot. What made this place jump onto people’s radars? Apparently J.K. Rowling tweeted that she started the first Harry Potter book there. The café’s website boasts plenty of famous visitors, so I’m a little skeptical that’s true. I think it’s more likely that the café is very cute and does a good job of promoting the famous people that have come to visit over the years.

Perhaps a 20-minute walk away from the Majestic is the Lello Bookshop (Livraria Lello). There are also rumors that J.K. Rowling used this bookshop as the inspiration for Flourish & Blotts in Diagon Alley. You should check this place out regardless of whether you’re a Harry Potter fan as it’s one of the most amazing bookshops I’ve ever seen. You must get a timed ticket ahead of time, which costs 10 euros (yes, it is that popular), but if you buy a book inside, the cost of the ticket is applied to your purchase. Just look at this magical staircase at the center of the bookshop. They sell plenty of books in English, Portuguese, Italian, French, and Spanish along with some keepsake bookstore items.

Porto Food Tour

One of the best things we did the entire vacation was to take a food tour of Porto. We booked the three-hour tour through Blue Dragon Tours and our tour guide, Maria, was the best. She not only took us to five amazing places for wonderful, local food & drink, but she was a fountain of cultural information and taught us all about the people of Porto, of which she is one, born & raised.

We started off at a simple Portuguese restaurant where we tried everyone’s favorite local beer, Superbock, soup, cod fritters, and a wonderful little sandwich called a bifana. Bifanas are pork (in our case, pulled pork) cooked in 4-5 different types of alcohol (beer, green wine, etc) on a homemade bun that soaks up all the liquidy goodness, but then encases it in a crispy crust so you can pick it up and eat it. We had a couple of bifanas on the trip and none of them were as good as the one at this little hole-in-the-wall restaurant we went to on the food tour. We also tried cod fritter at this stop. Cod is a staple in Portugal and is usually eaten salted. These fritters were warm and delicious and fairly filling.

At our second location, we visited a typical café and lunch spot, not far from the Majestic. There, we got to try pastel de nata, the Portuguese national pastry. Boy, was it delicious. We also learned about the typical Portuguese lunch. It seems that few people bring food into work because it is tradition to go out to lunch for two hours with your coworkers. Most people go to the same place every day and order the Portuguese menu which is a 2-3 course meal for 8 euros. Not only that, but the Portuguese are paid to take lunch and their employers pay for their lunches. It’s part of the national culture and, I’m sure, keeps some of these little family-run businesses up and running.

We then toured Bolhão Market and stopped at a place nearby to try Ginja, a tart, cherry alcoholic beverage, which we drank out of a chocolate shot glass. Then, we went to a Portuguese store selling good Portuguese bottles of wine (which cost around 3-5 euros in Portugal) and lots of staples that show up on tables around Christmas time. We had a lovely meat & cheese charcuterie board there, tried green wine, and enjoyed ourselves thoroughly.

But what Porto Food Tour would be complete without a Port Wine tasting? It turns out, Port Wine is not my favorite (although my husband really likes it). I prefer the Portuguese green wine, which is grown in two distinct regions nearby and harvested a little earlier than other wine grapes. But Port Wine goes great with chocolate after you’ve eaten a fantastic Portuguese meal. And, honestly, every meal is fantastic. The Portuguese know how to cook.

Francesinha

There is one more food in Porto that deserves its own section. Our food tour guide said that the only reason we didn’t get it on the tour is because it would completely fill us up. Enter: the famous Francesinha sandwich, or, as some menus in English called it, “the meat tower”. The Francesinha is two different types of pork, a beef steak, bread, cheese, gravy made from five different sauces (and that tastes surprisingly like gravy in the UK), and sometimes an egg on top. We walked to a highly-rated place specifically to get one and we were NOT disappointed. The Francesinha now shows up in my best dreams and I can’t wait to go get another one. We got our own. We should have shared.

Festival de São João

While we were there, the city was gearing up for its largest festival of the year, where two million extra people descend into the city to celebrate the Festival de São João.

While the festival honors Porto’s patron saint, the main point of the festival used to be more along the lines of match-making. Young men and women would leave the house, unencumbered by their families just once a year. If a boy liked you, he would hit you on the head with a clump of garlic so everyone would smell it and know you were taken. If you liked a boy, you would give them a plant and hit them on the head with a hammer. I like this idea of hitting men with hammers. Sadly, the hammers nowadays are plastic and make an annoying whistle sound. You can buy them everywhere in the city leading up to June 23rd, the day of the festival.

While we weren’t there for the festival, we did see evidence of it everywhere. Shopkeepers hauled giant bags of hammers and the streets were decorated everywhere. It was a lovely time to be in Porto!

Douro Valley Wine Tour

Our second full day in Porto, we took off and did a full day wine tour with four tastings along the way. It was a fantastic use of our day. Next week, I’ll take you into the beautiful Douro Valley and show you what we got to taste there.