Porto!

Last time we left you in Baiona. It was time to head head further South and explore the Portuguese coastline. First stop Porto! We were excited about seeing this place and we were not disappointed. In fact we liked it so much we stayed for a week and were sad to leave. That in case I thought Porto was worth a post all of its own….

The sail down from Baiona to Porto was pretty easy. Another downwind sail which we are now getting better at. The sea was rolly but we made great time, and our first stop was the little port of Laxioes about 2 miles North of Porto. What a dump! It was a proper working port, so maybe to be expected. However, they were in the process of dredging the harbour. We spent a very unpleasant night expecting to have our anchored sucked up at any moment by a 150m long dredge we will call the green dredging machine. At one point it came within 20 metres of us at anchor. Its somewhat disconcerting to say the least!

The next day we made a quick exit even though we found ourselves in thick fog and headed in to the Douro River to drop our anchor in Foz, about 2 miles from Porto centre.

Now this was more like it! A superb anchorage with easy access to the shore and a walk to get right in to the centre of Porto. Palm trees swaying in the breeze and insane jet boats bombing past throwing tourists around…

We settled in for the night, and then took our first trip in to town with no idea where we were going! Sometimes that’s the best way to just go and explore. The walk down the river was spectacular and we soon found ourselves climbing steep hills through winding narrow streets in to what we thought was the historic old town (apparently not!) and found ourselves in a square with a market, an old church and several restaurants. Time for a spot of lunch…

We had a wonderful first day and walked about 9 miles in total in the heat. And managed to eventually pub crawl our way back to the boat!

After a wonderful day of exploring, something still didn’t feel quite right? The pilot book described the historic old centre of Porto as medieval narrow street clinging to the edge of a steep hillside. Maybe we hadn’t actually visited this yet? The next outing then we took along John from Rival Spirit in an attempt to find the true centre of Porto. Turns out we just needed to walk a little further down the river! Here we found exactly what was described. A really stunning place all based around the river where you could get totally lost in the winding little streets and then at the top of the climb find yourself looking out over the rooftops of the whole city

No trip to Porto is complete though without sampling the delights of the local Port wines. This was to be our third mission… Ourselves and John set out to explore the port houses on the south side of the river. We chose the oldest port house in Porto for our sampling session , Kopje. We were not disappointed. Myself and John chose to try the sublime menu that included 5 glasses of Port including two white ports, and two ‘single harvest ‘ ports one of which was aged 1978. What a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, drinking fine ports and eating the accompanying chocolate. Highly recommended!

Slightly worst for the wear we eventually stumbled out of the Port house and there was still more to see on this interesting side of the river. It has a great atmosphere.

In the end we stayed in Port for a week. We could have stayed longer, so we were a little sad when the threat of some bad weather moved us on. Join us next time as we head South again towards Lisbon.