Europe 25: Porto, Day 2

Our second full day in Porto started out pretty much like the first one, with a leisurely breakfast and a nice shower because we had two showers in that apartment, one of which was a glass Eurobox that was nevertheless still about twice the size of the one we had in Italy and the other of which was more or less American-sized, and being able to turn around inside of a shower without accidentally shutting off the water or radically changing its temperature is an underestimated luxury in this world. Also, Porto does not seem to have the water issues that Italy does, so you don’t feel like you need to hurry to be done. There are few pleasures in this world as deep as a warm shower and a good breakfast on a slow morning.

Refreshed, we spent some time looking over the map and plotting out ideas for where to go in Porto. There are a lot of things to see there, after all. Eventually we decided to head down to the Cathedral.

And by down, we did in fact mean down.

This route into the downtown area became our usual path after this. It was reasonably direct and, if not particularly level at least sloped at a fairly consistent and manageable grade. You take your wins where you can.

The bird was just there along the way, having a grand time jumping into and out of the water stream though clearly not pleased at having been interrupted by some random tourist. It’s okay, bird. Go back to your frolicking.

Porto’s cathedral – the Sé do Porto – is fairly small as cathedrals go but definitely worth a visit. They started building it in the late 1100s CE and didn’t finish until the 16th century, though there was another round of construction in the Baroque period because that’s when Portugal was wealthy and everything was redone about then. You get to what is at least a temporary plateau in the long path downhill toward the river from our neighborhood, and once you figure out how to get across the fairly large street that sits in your way you find yourself on a wide plaza overlooking parts of the city that are even further down the hill. You get a nice overview from there. That’s the thing about Porto, really – you can get a pretty nice overview from almost anywhere that’s not actually on the river.

It only costs three euros to get into the cathedral – a bargain by Florentine standards – and the first thing you come to (or at least the first thing we came to) is an open stone cloister. On the outside there are covered passageways lined with tiled designs, as you eventually come to expect pretty much everywhere in Porto, and these are gorgeous.

These passageways surround a small space with a weathered stone cross pretty much dead center. You can go right up to it if you want and it’s interesting to see up close. There’s also a second level of the cloister that you can get to by a small staircase at one end, which we did a bit later.

The Cathedral itself is an odd combination of austere and gaudy. The entrance from the courtyard takes you into the nave and for a Catholic cathedral it’s surprisingly plain. It’s perhaps more powerful that way, as it forces you to focus on the structure and its purpose rather than on any decorative elements. The last photo shows the rose window in the back of the church and was taken from about the halfway point of the nave, so you can get a sense of the size of the place.

And then you turn around and you can see where the austerity starts to give way to the gaudiness.

The closer you get to the altar the more decorative it gets, and when you get right up on it there is just … a lot to see. Baroque as a style was neither subtle nor spare. The contrast between the front of the church and the rest of the church is really quite something.

There are side chapels up by the front as well as art on the side walls. I think my favorite bit up there was the white, pink and black marble front of the altar on one of the side chapels – you can see it in the second photo below. It’s a little less over the top than the rest of it.

One thing that was interesting about the place is that along the upper part of the nave there are these small stained glass windows, maybe a meter and a half (about five feet) tall. They don’t challenge the overall austerity of the nave much, but they do add a splash of color and we’d come back to them later in an odd sort of way.

There are other places to explore in the Cathedral as well. For one thing, there is an upstairs chapter house that was used for meetings and the like and it very much embodies the “let no surface go undecorated” ethos of the Baroque era. Right by it was an interesting fountain that probably had some allegorical significance – perhaps commentary on some of the previous occupants of the room, or just a more general statement about humanity. It’s all quite a bit to take in at once.

After the nave we went back to the cloister and found the stairway up to the second level. You can walk all the way around the cloister at that level and look out over the city as well as the little space where the Cathedral keeps its extra stuff because you have to keep things somewhere after all.

Also, we found the outside of the little stained glass windows that line the upper part of the nave. You don’t often get to see the outside of stained glass windows like that so it was a bit of an odd experience but a nice one for exactly that reason.

The upper level of the cloister is lined on two sides by massive tile murals, this being Porto, and they are fascinating to explore in detail. Kim ended up taking a pile of close-up photos to use on one of our later activities of the day.

And over in the corner is the tower, which you are invited to climb if you feel you have the patience and leg muscles to do so. We gave it a shot – why not, after all – and after what felt like an age we made it up to the top.

If we thought the views from the upper cloister were something, the ones from the tower were even more so. You’re way up there above the Cathedral proper where you can see out over the entire city and down to the large plaza in front of the Cathedral as well. It’s a great spot to linger and not just so you can catch your breath after the climb.

We climbed back down the tower and around the cloister to the stairs and eventually made our way back down to the plaza where there was a pretty good crowd milling about and being entertained by a street musician. You have to love the street musicians – they work hard and they have big dreams and some of them will actually break out and become well known though you can’t tell just by looking at them since most of them have enough talent but at a certain level the talent evens out and it’s just being in the right space at the right time that separates the known from the unknown. It’s a bit of a guessing game, really.

There was a vendor selling tea towels and the like who set up in a small space not far outside of the Cathedral so we stopped there. My go-to souvenir of a place is a keychain so I can use it as a Christmas ornament, but Kim’s is a tea towel which is eminently more practical. Tea towels obtained, we headed back up to our neighborhood, passing by the Igreja da Ordem do Terço, an 18th-century church dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary and, as always, covered in beautiful tiles.

For lunch we decided to try Cervejaria Gazela, which Graça recommended as a place to get the Portuguese equivalent of hot dogs. We’d seen it on our visit to the craft fair plaza so we headed back that way, stood in a very long line for a bit, and then left when it clearly wasn’t going to move. Fortunately it turned out that there was another Gazela just across the plaza – probably the original one, as it was much more plain and functional than the one we first tried – and the line there was both shorter and, in the end, skippable since we were only two people and the group in front of us was much larger. They had space for just two at the counter by the window, and we said sure.

A Portuguese hot dog is called a cachorrinho (which more or less translates as “puppy” according to the quick internet search I just did). It’s a pork sausage that is grilled and then put onto a grilled bun with cheese. It’s then briefly broiled (I was convinced the whole thing was lightly deep fried, but apparently not) until the cheese melts, and then it’s cut into slices as wide as your thumb and you pick them up and eat them with your fingers, slice by slice. You can put francesinha sauce on it if you want. They’re very good! Bring cash, though, since that’s all they accept at Gazela.

The waiter found us amusing and kept up a running banter the whole time we were ordering. He even convinced Kim to try a combination martini/beer that he said he’d finish if she didn’t like. In the end she said it tasted like celery but finished it anyway because that’s the kind of dedication you need when you’re traveling.

We didn’t realize until after we’d sat down that part of the reason why this place was so popular was that it is an Anthony Bourdain restaurant – he’d visited it on one of his shows and actually sat at the counter where we sat, looking out into the street. I miss Anthony Bourdain – of all the celebrity deaths of the last decade or so, that one still stings the most – and it was a lovely thing to realize we were following in his footsteps there. You can see his picture underneath the “ze” in Gazela.

We split up on the way back to the apartment in order to get food for further breakfasts. I stopped at the Pingo Doce for meats, cheeses, and bread while Kim continued on to the greengrocer for fruit. She struck up a conversation with the teenaged boy working there who excited to tell her all about his plans to come to the US next year for the World Cup so he could see Cristiano Ronaldo play in his last few games. He was deeply impressed that Kim a) actually knew what he was talking about and b) had been to the Rome Derby (Roma v. Lazio) in 2022. Score one for the Americans! We’re not entirely uninformed about the rest of the world! Not all of us, anyway!

Pretty much the only firm commitment we had during our time in Porto was a tile-making class that afternoon. Our friends Josh and Sarah had set it up and we kept it when they were unable to join us in Porto, so after dropping off our groceries we walked over from the apartment to the little art studio where the class was being held and found a couple of seats around a large wooden table. There were eleven of us there for the class – three of whom had direct ties to Philadelphia and three of whom were teachers, oddly enough – and all but two were Americans. The other two were Italian. There was a family with a boy of around eight whom we all sort of adopted – it turned out that he is a fan of books like The Hobbit, so book recommendations were definitely in order!

Daniela, the instructor, was a very patient soul who explained how tile making worked and got us started fairly quickly.

Each of us got two tiles as part of the class – white squares about five inches (25 cm) to a side and covered with a powdery white fixative of some kind – and we dutifully painted our names and the date on the back of each one so we could pick them up later, after they’d been fired. Daniela let us do the ones that Josh and Sarah would have done as well, and when we got back to the US we mailed them off to them. Tiles are a lot of fun to make, it turns out.

There are basically two strategies to making tiles.

First, there is the stencil method. Daniela had several large books of designs and if you liked one you could take the numbered stencils out of the envelope behind them. My first one was one of these, and you start with the lightest colored dye (Stencil #1) and then work your way up to the darker ones. It came out pretty well, if a bit ragged around the edges.

The other way is to do something freehand, which I tried for my second tile. The problem with that is that I have pretty much no artistic talent when it comes to drawing – I won second prize in an art contest when I was in second grade and I could probably go into any second-grade classroom in America today and still get second prize if I were lucky – so I chose one of the three or four things that I have learned how to draw over the years and tried that. You sketch it out in pencil – which burns off in the kiln so you don’t have to worry about erasing anything – and then go over it with the dyes.

Kim went for broke with the freehand drawings for her two tiles, which makes sense since a) she actually has artistic talent and b) she’d taken quite a few photographs of the tiles at the Cathedral to use as inspiration. As befitting a Porto tile project she worked in cobalt blue, which is actually purple until you fire it. She chose to do a two-tile design and it turned out very well.

We ended up staying about half an hour over time to get the extra tiles done, but Daniela was very generous and let us do that. And then we went back to the apartment to hang out for a bit until it was time to go to the Fado concert.

When you travel to a place you usually have one or two fixed-point destinations, things that you are set on doing in that place even if the rest of your plans fall through, and one of Kim’s for Porto was to go to a Fado concert.

Fado is a type of Portuguese music. The name translates as “longing” and it’s emotional, deeply melancholy, and fairly spontaneous – performers generally don’t come in with set lists, for example, but choose songs as their hearts dictate. In some ways it sounds kind of like a cross between a more earthy version of Edith Piaf and a slow blues, though there’s more to it than that. You can find these concerts all over Porto, and we bought tickets for one that we’d seen advertised on the walls of a monastery in the downtown area except that when we got there it turned out that the concert wasn’t actually at the monastery, so we had to backtrack a bit to get to the Casa Guitarra near the Dom Luis bridge – slightly downhill from the Cathedral – to see the show. We missed the first song and had to sit in the back, but we got to see the rest of the show.

The venue was upstairs, above a shop, and it seated maybe three dozen people so sitting in the back wasn’t all that much of a sacrifice. On stage was a three-piece band consisting of a guitar, a double-bass, and a Portuguese guitar, which looks a bit like a flattened lute and has the pegs at the end of the fret board rather than on the sides. There were two singers – one woman and one man – and they took turns with their sets. Each did a set of about three songs, then there was an intermission during which everyone got a glass of port wine, and then they did another set apiece.

After it was over it was still light out, so we walked the thirty or forty meters to the Dom Luis I Bridge.

The Dom Luis I bridge was completed in 1886 and was designed by Théophile Seyrig, a student of Gustave Eiffel, which explains a lot about what it looks like, and it connects Porto with Vila Nova de Gaia across the Duoro River. It’s got two levels – an upper level about 45 meters (150 feet or so) above the river that is open to pedestrians and the metro trains, and a lower level much further down that is for pedestrians, public transportation such as buses, taxis, and cyclists. We walked downhill from the Casa Guitarra to the upper level of the bridge and headed across the river.

You get some spectacular views of both Porto and Gaia from the bridge, and that’s a lot of the draw really. It’s always full of people. In theory you’re supposed to stick to the pedestrian walkways on the sides of the bridge if you’re just walking across but you can always feel the metro trains approaching long before they arrive so people walk wherever they want and just scoot over to the side when the bridge starts to rumble a bit.

We didn’t spend much time on the Gaia side that evening – we’d save that for future days – but once you get over there you can look back across the river and see the funicular that leads upward from the lower level to more or less our neighborhood if you just keep going through the station and off to the right.

We walked back across the bridge and caught a bus to our neighborhood because it was getting fairly late for dinner even by Portuguese standards. We ended up at a kebab place near our apartment that was weirdly empty (it was right next to a couple of very hip and popular places, which probably didn’t help) but had very good food - the best doner in Porto, as far as our experience went - and a really great slogan.

From there it was back to the apartment to relax and think about the next day’s explorations.