Allow me to start this by calling out the fact that this is my 300th post here at That One Guy Who Travels! When I started this blog a decade ago, I’m not sure how long I planned to stick with it, but I’m very glad to have had the chance to share so many travels with all of you. I certainly plan to continue in the future, so hopefully you’re looking forward to reading more! 🙂 And if you’re feeling nostalgic, why not check out my 200th post (a Travel Throwback to my UK trip in Sep/Oct 2007) and my 100th post (a post about our time in Zurich, at the end of a three-week trip with Scott).

And now, back to Porto!

I’m starting this post on Thursday, which is our last day in Porto, as we’re flying home tomorrow morning. After only getting here on Tuesday, we obviously don’t have a ton of time to explore the city, especially after we didn’t get to see a lot on Tuesday, thanks to the less-than-delightful weather. Because of that, we were determined to do as much as possible yesterday and I’m VERY thankful the weather was so much better, allowing us to see a lot, get lots of steps in, and have a very good day. Until the rain came back in the evening, that is. But let’s not focus on that!

Our first night’s sleep in the Gran Cruz was pretty decent, though I found the pillows to be a little sub-par as they were too soft/squishy for my comfort (which is a little ironic, as the pillows in our Lisbon hotel were a bit too hard/floofy – can’t win ’em all!). I was awake around 8:30, though Scott slept a bit later and decided he wasn’t interested in breakfast, since we had eaten a fair amount of Indian food the night before, but our “eccentric” guy at the hotel reception had really talked up the breakfast (which is included in our rate, but ordering from a menu vs. a buffet like many hotels), so I wanted to give it a try. Thankfully, with a breakfast window of 8-10:30 AM, I had plenty of time to shower and get down to the restaurant to enjoy a nice morning meal. I will say that I wasn’t overwhelmed or underwhelmed with it. I was just…whelmed. 🙂 The menu isn’t large, as you’ll see below, and I was a little surprised at the fact that they didn’t put my order of an omelet with bacon and tomato together, instead giving me an “omelet” of just eggs (so, folded scrambled eggs, basically) along with bacon and fried tomatoes. So I just put it together myself with each bite!

The bread came first, so I got a photo of that separate from my deconstructed omelet. I really liked the butter and jam on the croissants!

With a good meal in my tummy, we (well, mostly Scott) pulled together a game plan of what to see and do. Despite the forecast, the weather wasn’t rainy yet (though it was mostly cloudy and it had clearly rained earlier in the morning), so we hit the ground running to see whatever we could. Well, I say “running” but I actually mean climbing and stair-stepping as that’s what it took to up from our hotel to what we wanted to see. People weren’t lying about the hilly nature of Porto, that’s for sure! I feel like we experienced the most hills (well, climbing stairs – plenty of them) on the way to our first stop. As always, I grabbed a few photos of that journey, which you can see below.

Would you believe that our first stop of the day was another church? That’s right, just like the previous day, we visited a new-to-us church, Sé do Porto (Porto Cathedral), a Catholic church that dates back to its groundbreaking in 1110 (though it wasn’t completed in its current form for several hundred years, in 1737 – wow!). Mass is still held here daily, but it’s unsurprisingly a big tourist destination, both because of its imposing nature and interesting architecture, but I can now say it’s also because of the great views of Porto you can experience! From the plaza in front of the church, to the walkway above the cloisters, to the tower at the top, you get plenty of chances to gaze across Porto, taking in its cool buildings and neat landmarks. Honestly, we found the €3 entrance fee worth it for the views alone! I definitely recommend putting this on your must-see list in Porto, but be sure you check out all the various viewpoints so you don’t miss anything. And as you’ll see in the photos below, we even got some SUNSHINE to give our photos some extra life (and to prevent us from getting rained on).

Look at the views AND the blue sky breaking through!

Two shots of cathedral’s exterior, one from the side (isn’t it cool with the sun behind it??) and another from the plaza in front of it.

As for going into the church, it was a pretty standard experience, though there was some interesting stuff to see, as usual. We did have to wait in line for maybe 5-7 minutes (long enough that I had time to find and buy entry tickets online, allowing us to bypass the last bit of line and just walk in), but I noticed there was no line when we left, so I wonder if we just happened to get a line or if we were made to wait a bit because we got there around the time the daily service was probably ending. It could have just been coincidence, but that’s something to look out for if you’re going around 11:30-11:45ish as that’s likely when the 11 AM service would end. Something a bit unusual about this church (in my experience at least) is that you don’t enter via the church proper, but rather on a path that takes you first to the exterior cloisters/courtyard, then to a side chapel, then the upper, exterior viewing points, and THEN into the actual church. Not a problem at all, but don’t be confused when you don’t see the “proper” church right away.

Although all that interior stuff is impressive, it’s really the views that make this place worthwhile, as you’ll see below. It was a bit windy, but the fact that it wasn’t raining at all and that we even had some sun was amazing, especially given the forecast. Check out the visual evidence below!

Walking along the path above the cloisters and looking down into them (on the left) and up towards the tower we would soon visit (on the right).

We continued to enjoy the sun (and lack of rain) as we made our way to the next destination, which you’ve actually already seen in the background of some of the photos above. The Torre dos Clérigos (Clérigos Tower) is another viewpoint, one with 220+ steps to get to the stop. This was another church stop, as the tower is part of Clérigos Church and we did walk through it because our €8 ticket included access to both, but the view from 75 meters up is what we were really after. We only had to walk ~15 minutes to get there (though it looked further from the cathedral), but we were rerouted slightly due to the construction for the new subway line that’s happening in the city center, but we didn’t have any issues reaching our destination. We had already purchased our time slot-specific tickets online, but we did still have to go to the ticket counter to show them that online order so they could give us paper tickets, which were then scanned to get us into the first part of the experience (the church’s museum) and were also checked a second time to get access to the tower.

If I’m honest, we didn’t pay a ton of attention to the museum as we were sort of inundated with church stuff on this trip (since we, as you know, visited several churches), but you may certainly enjoy it. Be aware that the path to the tower felt a little weird, as we were walking through a signed path that first took us through the museum, then took us past a couple of balcony views of the church interior, then seemingly took us up and down a few small staircases, and then finally got us to the tower, with the church proper at the end. Although 220 stairs sounds like a lot, it didn’t actually feel like that many, maybe because some of the path we took on the way to the tower counted towards that number? That seems like a weird way to count, but who knows. Also, something to know about this tower is that it has tight stone stairs (not TOO tight, but not open either) and both up and down traffic use the same stairs. This can be a bit problematic, as we discovered the time we got temporarily stuck in the Florence Duomo, but wasn’t too bad here (we did have to wait a minute or so as some folks passed us going down when we were going up and then we caused some folks to stop going up when we were going down). But something to know for folks who may be claustrophobic! You can see an example of the stairs below, along with other photos, so judge for yourself. 🙂

Of course I couldn’t narrow it down to just one photo of the views because there are multiple angles from which to photograph the city.

Next up, NOT a church!! So what was it? Why, a bookstore, of course! Livraria Lello (Lello Bookstore, in English) is a bookstore (duh) that’s famous for its beauty. And, I suppose, for its books as well, but those are more incidental. 🙂 Its history goes back to the mid-1800s and, over time, it just became a popular place to visit, particularly for tourists, presumably because it’s such a unique-looking shop. However, it wasn’t until July 2015 that you had to pre-book a paid ticket to gain entry to the shop, because it was just getting so popular! While it may sound a little…capitalist to charge a fee to enter a shop where you will then (potentially) spend more money to buy wares from that shop, it’s actually a very fair setup in that you pay €8 to book your entry time, but if you decide to buy a book, you get an €8 discount on that book, so it evens out. I’m sure many people (like us) visit the shop without buying anything (we did think about picking up a cookbook, but didn’t end up buying it), but if you’re going to buy the book, you’d be spending more than the entry fee anyway, so it all works out.

Even though we didn’t buy any books, the shop was worth visiting, so I’m glad we went. It’s definitely BUSY though, so be prepared for that! They have a good system in place, with two lines outside, one for the current entry group and one for the next one (we had 2 PM tickets, so we saw the 1:30 PM line and the 2 PM line, so it was clear where we had to go). Be sure to plan ahead for the tickets though, since you may not be able to get same-day tickets for the time you’re walking by and decide you want to go in. They do have staff outside to manage lines and scan tickets and I saw them pointing more than a few people to the sign that explained the process and had a QR code that pointed to the ticket website, but hopefully with this post, you’ll understand the importance of pre-booking. 🙂

A couple of shots of the store’s famous staircase. It’s really cool to see in person!

A couple more photos of the staircase, this time from the top level. I almost got a shot of it empty, but then of course more people showed up. 🙂

Remember how we went to a church and then another church and then a bookstore? Yeah, our next stop was…another church. This was kind of the day of church-visiting, it seems! This next visit was a little bit out of necessity though as the weather started to work against us after we left Livraria Lello, with the wind whipping up and some raining starting to spit down, so neither of us were excited about having to stay outside in that. Thankfully, Igreja do Carmo (Carmo Church) is just around the corner from the bookstore, so we only had to put up with the rain for a short distance. I’m not even sure if this one was on our list of places to visit, but it provided a welcome respite from the rain (which turned out to be short-lived, thankfully!).

I say this is one church, but technically it’s two, with Igreja dos Carmelitas Descalços (Carmelitas Church) built directly next to it. Again though, it’s technically NOT directly next to it, as there’s a VERY narrow house built between the two, which was done to keep the monks in Carmo Church separate from the nuns in Carmelitas Church. I didn’t even know that until writing this post, so hopefully it’s good info for you to use on your Porto trip now! To be fair, when we went inside, it didn’t feel like two separate churches, but I’m now wondering if we only really experienced one of them during our relatively brief time there. Still though, it was nice to have somewhere to escape the rain, while also getting to see more of Porto’s history.

By the time we left the church, the rain had pretty much stopped and the sun was coming out again. Hooray! Scott was feeling a little hungry and wanted to see what Porto’s bifana was like, so he had looked up a restaurant known for theirs. So we walked over to Conga to give it a try for ourselves. He had a standard bifana, while I tried something a little different – a hot dog with cheese and bifana meat spread over it. Both were tasty! Stay tuned for some more info on Porto’s bifana in my next post, as our food tour guide had some thoughts to share.

The rest of our day offered us no more churches, but definitely some more outstanding views of the sights around Porto. If you’ll recall, Dom Luís I Bridge is very near our hotel, so we saw it every time we went outside. We wanted to see it up close though, so we decided to head back towards the hotel and walk across the bridge, as there are pedestrian paths both across it and below it. The sun really was back in full force (well, at least in part of the sky), which made for a pleasant walk and some very nice photos, as you can see below. It was definitely WINDY though, so don’t underestimate the importance of hanging onto handrails and watching where you’re going so you don’t get blown away! Thankfully, we didn’t. 🙂

Views from both sides of the bridge. You can see it was decidedly sunnier on the right side!

And why not take a couple of selfies once we reached the other side? The views of Porto behind us made for a great backdrop!

As we were walking on the bridge, we got a closer look at the Teleférico de Gaia (the cable car we spotted when we first got to our hotel). Although we didn’t have tickets and weren’t necessarily planning to ride it, our walk across the bridge took us just about to the entrance to it, so we decided to keep taking advantage of the nice weather and taking a short ride. We opted to just buy one-way tickets for €7 each because we learned the trip isn’t very long anyway (less than a half-mile, I think), so we thought it would be nice to take the one-way trip down and then walk back using the path underneath the bridge, which would then get us back to our hotel. Perfect!

I’m not sure if there are normally any lines for this particular attraction, but there were none this day, so we quickly reached the ticket office and then went directly to the cable car for our short trip. We were hopeful we could ride in a car with just the two of us, so were slightly dismayed to see a sign before we boarded telling us that each car holds 4-8 people. Thankfully though, the minimum of four people wasn’t enforced by anyone, so we just hopped in the first available car and were on our way. It’s not a long ride or an especially interesting one (since we’d already seen so many great views of the city anyway), but it was a neat experience nonetheless. I don’t think I’d say it’s a must-do in Porto, but it’s a fun novelty, if nothing else.

Would you believe we squeezed even a few MORE views out of this already view-filled day?! Well, believe it, because we did. 🙂 Because the cable car ride wasn’t very long, we didn’t have a long walk to get back to our hotel, though it did involve walking along the river and then crossing the bridge again, this time from the path underneath it. We wandered along, watching people go by and street vendors sell their wares (while also trying to keep them in one place, since the wind had started blowing again). We found a place to get some ice cream and also stopped for a bit to FaceTime Scott’s parents as we knew they’d enjoy the views.

I was focusing a little more on the water in these photos.

More river-centric photos as we crossed to the other side, heading back to our hotel.

What a nice, full day we had! We ended up laying low in the hotel for the evening because <drum roll> the rain came back! And it wasn’t just spitting a few sprinkles this time, but rather full-on raining for much of the evening, which was a drag. But we got to see and do a lot with our first full day in Porto, so we still had fun! We were bummed that we didn’t get to go out and experience a cool restaurant, but stay tuned for the next post, where I’ll share details of the food tour we did on the Thursday (so at least we still got some good food experiences). Although I’m finally publishing THIS post a couple of weeks after we got home from Portugal, it won’t take that long to get the final post out there for your reading enjoyment. 🙂