Porto is two towns that agreed to share a river. Everything people come for is on the north bank; everything they photograph the north bank from is on the south. You cannot do the city properly without crossing at least twice, and the crossings are the best part of it.
Start at the top. Walk out onto the upper deck of the Luis I bridge, where the metro runs and where the drop is genuinely alarming, and keep going to the Serra do Pilar terrace. That is the postcard, and it is worth ten minutes before the coaches arrive.
Looking back over the old town from the south bank. Photo: Tobias Reinert.
Down, then back
The descent into Vila Nova de Gaia takes twenty minutes and the cellars at the bottom open at ten. Book one. They are all much the same, and which one matters far less than the fact that you sat down for an hour in the middle of a day made entirely of hills.
- Cross high, return low. The upper deck for the view, the lower deck for the shade and the river noise.
- Ribeira is for the evening, not for lunch. At noon it is a wall of menus in four languages.
- The cathedral is free; the cloister is not, and the cloister is the part worth paying for.
Porto rewards being slightly above it. Ten metres of height turns the whole town from a jumble into a plan.
The bit people skip
Walk east instead of west. Past the Infante bridge the riverfront empties out inside four hundred metres, and a path follows the water for another two kilometres with nothing on it but joggers and one very good cafe. It is the only stretch of Porto where the river is allowed to be just a river.
