porto, portugal

For our first trip of 2018, we wanted to do a quick and inexpensive weekend trip that was easy to plan, and we checked all of those boxes with Porto! A quick weekend in Porto should be filled with exploring the beautiful city, eating fresh seafood, and most importantly, port wine tasting (which ours most certainly was). All port wines are made in this region, so the wine flows like water and you need to taste it fresh from the source while you have the chance! There are some other great things about the city too – there are so many old stone buildings. Like…really old. Like 1500s old.

Porto also has an abundance of colorful ceramic tiles covering the fronts of buildings that are really, really beautiful. Here is an example:

We only had about a day and a half to see Porto, so we spent lots of time wandering to see the main sights in the city, including churches and government buildings.

The tiling on the front of this church was really unique

Porto’s city hall

The view from the top of Clerigos tower – 250 narrow steps and you are rewarded with this!

The inside of the Church of Sao Pedro dos Clerigos

Porto Cathedral – from 1737. Like I said…old!

The Porto cathedral with tiling on the inner walls.

Inside the Porto Cathedral

Front of the Porto Cathedral

This bird was posing perfectly for my photo of Clerigos Tower in the background!

We also took a boat tour and explored the area near the Douro river. Our first day was gloomy so we took most of our pictures on day 2!

Views of the Douro River

Views of the Douro River

On a boat tour on the Douro River

On a boat tour on the Douro River

You can tell how old the city is by looking at some of the buildings, they look like they are about to fall at any second

Views of the Douro River

Views of the Douro River

Views of the Douro River

Views of the Douro River

Views of the Douro River

And of course, we drank port. We did tastings at three different port wineries and all were great. We learned about how port is made, too, which was really interesting! Did you know that port wine is actually wine mixed with a liquor similar to brandy? They stop the fermentation of the grapes after just three days so the wine is 0% alcohol, and then they mix in the good stuff! Who knew?!

Tasting a white port, tawny port, and ruby port.

If you ever offer Steve port after dinner, he will accept.

Ruby port ages in large vats rather than barrels so that it has less contact with the wood and therefore absorbs less of the flavor!

Red vs. White. Red wins! White port is good, but red is better in my opinion

Chocolate/port pairing

Barrels and barrels of port wine!

This tasting was our first try at Rose port. Red still wins!

We also saw a fado performance, which is a must do in Portugal. We visited Lisbon, Portugal 6 years ago and had this on our to-do list, but we never found the opportunity so we were excited to finally see a live performance! Fado is a Portuguese genre of music that is almost always accompanied by a Portuguese guitar. It is easy listening while you sip on some port!

The Portuguese guitar is smaller and rounder than a normal guitar

Fado show!