Porto - June 2025
To celebrate our thirtieth anniversary, we spend a few days in Porto, Portugal. We have only been to Lisbon, so everything in the city was new to us.
Day one
We flew in and got to our hotel, Babel Guesthouse, around four. Babel is an old building with a good restaurant on the ground floor. The rooms are very modern and big. Ours was just a big room with a dry kitchen and a good bathroom. We really liked it and the location was great.
After we settled in, we headed down to the riverside and had a drink and some snacks. The river is very busy with tourists and full of outdoor bars. Great for people watching.
For dinner we headed to The Wine Box and sampled a few whites and some tapas.
Afterwards, we headed up the hill and had some more wine at Babel and natas from Manteigaria, the first of 20 we had over the course of the trip.
Day two
Today we explored the Porto side of the river. We started at the Mercado do Bolhão. It was very pretty and the stalls very nice, but it is completely for tourists. I can’t imagine locals would use the market at all. After the market, we headed all the way across town to Jardins do Palácio de Cristal which was pretty, but looked nothing like their marketing photos.
We headed back towards the centre for lunch at Casa Viúva, which was very busy, but excellent and very reasonable. After lunch we visited Livraria Lello bookshop. It has a very pretty and complex, art deco interior. However, there are way too many people allowed inside, even with their ticketing system, to be even vaguely enjoyable. I understand how complicated it is for them to be so popular, yet want to remain a bookshop, but the formula is flawed. We hated it.
For dinner, we went to Gazella for their famous hot dog sandwiches. They were devine.
To end the evening, we had some red wine at ALIBI by YoursPorto and chatted with some funny Austrians.
Day three
Today we booked a port tasting a Cockburn’s on the other side of the river in the town of Nova de Gaia. So we hiked over the famous Luís I Bridge designed by Effile. We started at Fonseca for a tasting and then had lunch at a local place that made an excellent pork loin sandwich.
The tour and tasting at Cockburn’s was great and we had an excellent cheese board as well.
We headed back to our hotel and then went for dinner at Taberna Santo António, which was very simple, but excellent. Then we had drinks on the rooftop overlooking the river at Torreão restaurante.
Day four
Today we decided to visited Matosinhos, the fishing and port town of Porto, just to the north. We took a bus and started with a visit the Canary with a Sardine tasting in Pinhais Cannery & Co. The tour was great and fun and the sardines pretty tasty. I really recommend it.
After the tour, we had an amazing grilled fish lunch at O Robalo. Then we headed back to Porto.
In the evening, we had a simple dinner at Flor de Bragança and a few drinks at Babel.
We flew home the next morning very early, but it was a great trip.
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