Last month we traveled to Portugal with my parents for a seven-day river cruise. We flew to Porto (a city I must admit I’d never heard of before) and sailed from there up the Douro river, in the heart of Portuguese wine country. I learned a lot. For one thing, Portuguese sounds nothing like Spanish in my opinion.
Porto is surprising. It’s pretty big for one thing — especially for a city I didn’t know existed. It is second only to Lisbon in size, with about 1.3 million people.
Porto is a city of sharp contrasts. The airport is modern and pleasant, with a metro line that takes you downtown quietly and efficiently. The metro stations reminded me a little of Copenhagen’s metro stations. And then you climb the stairs to the street and BAM! – there’s the contrast. Porto is full of beautiful old buildings… many of which have clearly been abandoned and some of which appear ready to be condemned.
But it’s not a city of ruins — not by any means. It’s a vibrant and bustling metropolis. But that just makes it more strange because, in a city that is clearly not dying it’s strange to see that perhaps as many as one in four buildings in the medieval part of the city are visibly falling apart.
If we’d had more time, it would have been interesting to see the newer parts of Porto. We pretty much only saw the touristy and ancient part of the city, and naturally a city of this size has more sides to it than that.
Porto was also incredibly hot, especially when we first arrived. We took a short taxi ride to the boat, and, as we crossed the bridge over the river, we could see the smoke from several fires. Most were in the distance, but there was one right on the cliff below the bridge. It gave the impression that the whole country was on fire.
We weren’t sure just what to expect of the boat. Years ago I took a short cruise to the Bahamas, but I figured this would be a much smaller boat than a full-fledged ocean cruise ship. But it was a pretty big boat. It had four levels if you counted the sun-deck (where we spent a lot of time), and even had a pool.
Dad considered them as “delays billed as attractions,” but one of the facets of this cruise is that you go through five locks. (And, since we sailed back to our starting point, that meant we passed through each lock twice.) I’m sure that the locks onthe Panama Canal are more impressive, but these locks are amazing. The Carrapatelo lock (above) has the highest difference in water levels in Europe — 35 meters or 114 feet. It’s incredible, especially when you consider how much water is involved for each passage.
Aside from the locks, the next most interesting sights along the river is the abandoned estates and villas. Not all of them are abandoned, but perhaps a third of the houses we saw were either clearly abandoned, or at least lacked evidence of life.
We had seen pictures of these terraced vineyards on the advertising for the cruise. I skeptically figured that sure, there is a stretch along the river that looks like this, but it’s the exception and not the rule. I was wrong. We passed sites like these for entire days.
Something else that surprised us about Portugal is that there aren’t many towns or attractions along the river. We sailed along for hours without seeing more than the occasional car or small boat. And when we did see towns, they were generally small towns. We stopped in Pinhão (above) twice. It seemed like a tiny town, but my subsequent research puts it at around 3,000 people.
Our turn-around point was Barca d’Alva — a town that the ship crew described to us as “200 people and a lot of dogs”. It is indeed a small town (but we didn’t see many dogs). Barca d’Alva is very near Spain. In fact we docked on the Spanish side of the river the night we arrived.
We sailed back the way we came, stopping at some but not all of the same places. It might have been a little boring, but now it was the weekend, and the river was much livelier than it had been on the way up. It still wasn’t the summer buzz that I expected, but there were boats and jets skis in the water, and people on the beaches. This went a long way to reverse my perceptions of Portugal as sleepy and partly abandoned.
We got back to Porto at dusk, and the ship sailed through the city and to the sea before turning around.
The trip confirmed something that we all suspected but never before spoke of: my dad and I are both quite severely addicted to the Internet. There was no service on the boat, and that was a bit of a shock. Questions about where we were kept popping up — questions that normally would be answered quickly with a few Google searches.
When we got back to Copenhagen (and hence my beloved connection) I learned that Portugal, despite being one of Europe’s poorest nations, has opted to invest heavily in renewable energy. There’s an interesting article in the New York Times here. These two facts help explain the crumbling buildings. A struggling country has to be selective about priorities, and Portugal is clearly decided to let the past go and concentrate on the future.
(More pictures from Portugal here.)
lady in red = hottie!