Porto in the summer
Porto, you stole a piece of my heart and for that, I am forever grateful!
Porto smells like rain and grilled sardines and something older than both. We arrived in October, when the city belongs to itself again. No tour groups on the tram. No queues at the pastelaria. Just the particular quiet of a European city in autumn, the light going golden at four in the afternoon, and the sound of fado drifting from somewhere we never quite found. We had no itinerary. This is the only way we know how to travel. We found the Mercado do Bolhão on the first morning and went back every day after that. The cheese vendor learned our order by day three. My daughter decided that the market was the best place in the world, which I am choosing to take as a sign that we are doing something right.
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Every morning before anyone else was awake, I walked to a café on Rua das Flores whose name I never wrote down and whose coffee I have been trying to recreate ever since. Dark, short, taken standing at the zinc bar with the newspaper I could not read. The owner nodded at me on day two. By day four he had the cup ready when he saw me at the door. This is what slow travel gives you. Not the famous things. The regularity of small things.
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The blue tiles on every surface — azulejos that have been there since the sixteenth century, that have witnessed everything, that will outlast us all. The Douro at dusk. The sound of the bridge in wind. The way the city climbs the hillside as though it had no choice, as though it simply grew that way over centuries. My son ate his first francesinha and declared it the greatest thing he had ever eaten. He is not entirely wrong.
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Go in October or November. Rent an apartment in Bonfim rather than a hotel — you want a kitchen and a neighbourhood. Take the 28 tram at least once, early in the morning before it fills. Walk across the Dom Luís bridge and back. Eat the pastel de nata at Manteigaria and nowhere else. [ add travel essentials]
“The full Porto guide — every address, every neighborhood, everything we found that made the trip — is available to download below.”
✦ The Porto City Guide — 10 pages, instant download — [add shop link]
✦ The bag I travel with — [add affiliate link]
✦ The journal I keep on every trip — [add affiliate link]
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