Porto
In addition to being a city I’ve always wanted to visit, Porto made a ton of sense logistically too in terms of my travels. I was heading there from Santiago and It’s just a couple of hours south by car. I took a “BlaBlaCar” which is kind of like Uber for hitchhiking. My BlaBlaCar looked like Bob Odenkirk and thankfully allowed me to nod off instead of chitchat. I arrived in Porto at 1 in the morning and headed to my hostel that thankfully had 24-hour reception.
Lisbon gets most of the attention and visitors, but tourism has also exploded in Porto over the past several years. Tourists are flocking to the city to experience its colorful architecture, famous food, and beautiful views. The fact that I was traveling on a strict budget made me get creative with some of my activities in the city.
I spent my first day in Porto more-or-less just walking around. Walking is the cheapest travel activity and after walking El Camino de Santiago I had gotten pretty good at it over the past six weeks. There’s also something much more rewarding about discovering something cool by stumbling into it versus being served it up by an algorithm aggregating customer reviews. A perfect example of something I stumbled into was a marionette museum.
The MUSEU DAS MARIONETAS DO PORTO is a small museum dedicated to a prominent puppeteer in Portugal named João Paulo Seara Cardoso. Cardoso counted Jim Henson, among others, as his mentor and created shows for Portuguese television that also aired in several countries across Europe. His troupe MARIONETAS DO PORTO toured different puppet productions all over as well. The puppets in the museum represented the work of many different artists but they shared a whimsical and demented quality that reminded me of fractured fairytales. The entrance was covered in posters of previous productions which ranged from Winnie the Pooh to Macbeth to their take on the work of Samuel Beckett.
One standout section of the museum allowed me to try my hand at being a puppeteer. I have no evidence of this because I couldn’t film and perform in my puppet show at the same time.
Other standout moments from my aimless, self-guided tour of Porto included the restaurant/bar-laden riverside area called Ribeira. Unfortunately, having a drink at one of these places was not in the budget. I also walked in and then immediately walked out of an incredibly deranged sardine store where the employees were dressed in what can only be described as The Greatest Showman-drag.
The best activity in Porto is technically not in Porto at all but in the city of Gaia, south of the Douro river. Most people would assume they were still in Porto but it’s one of those Minneapolis/St. Paul situations. As sunset began I walked across the Ponte Luís bridge to Jardim do Mouro, a park with an absolutely gorgeous view of Porto. The crowds in the park gave me the impression that this was just something that happened every night in Porto.. The golden glow of the sunset created a striking visual of the colorful architecture for which Porto is famous. The moment peaked when a man on a guitar started playing Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper’s “Shallow” from A Star is Born.
Day 2
I got an early start and went to Porto Cathedral (Sé do Porto) as soon as it opened. I always try and go to major tourist attractions at the beginning or end of a day when there are fewer people.
Despite being raised Catholic, I only just learned on this trip that no matter how many churches there might be in a city, there will only ever be one [Catholic] cathedral. Sé do Porto is located on top of a hill at one of the highest points in Porto and very close to my hostel. They charged a 3 euro entrance fee, which I feel is a bit tacky for a place of worship but on par for an organization that previously charged people to get into heaven.
The interior of the Cathedral was intricate with ceramic tiling I had never seen before in a Catholic Cathedral but appeared to be pretty typical from what I had seen in Portugal.
Feeling pretty satisfied that I knocked out a major tourist attraction before 11, I walked back to my hostel and worked on my blog for a bit (meta!). I logged on to a Gay Social Networking App™ and chatted with a guy named Fabi who was on holiday visiting his family in Porto. He invited me out to a beach about 35 minutes south of Porto called Praia da Madalena . I figured this was one of those moments where I would get to experience an area of the city that wasn’t on the hop-on-hop-off bus tour. Porto was also experiencing a bit of a heat wave so this seemed like a great way to cool off.
Praia da Madalena was a picturesque beach with two major problems for someone trying to go for a swim:
The water was full of giant jagged rocks that weren’t visible until the waves thrashed me into them.
The water was fucking freezing.
Fabi was impressed by my strong tolerance for the cold water, which I attributed it to my hirsuteness and Alaskan upbringing. My feet were getting cut up by the rocks and I felt like I was just one strong wave or two from a Goldie-Hawn-in-Overboard amnesia situation.
We laid out on the beach for a bit and Fabi humored me by taking pictures. After a while we decided to walk down the coast to a church we could barely make out in the distance.
The church was called CAPELA DO SENHOR DA PEDRA “Chapel of the Lord of Stone” and was unique because of its placement on the beach surrounded by rocks. Depending on the tide, the church can get completely surrounded by water. Fabi told me prior to walking there that the site has a reputation for being a place where people come to practice rituals and that I would likely see candle wax on the rocks from someone’s rituals. Sure enough, on one of the boulders next to the chapel I could see quite a bit of melted candle wax.
Before being made into a church in the 17th Century, Capela do Senhor da Pedra was a pagan place of worship. As a way of cleansing the site’s heretical origins, the Catholic Church constructed the chapel. According to Atlas Obscura, every year a 3-day festival is held culminating in a procession of fully cloaked women walking to the church. Spooky but where do I sign up?
When I got back up to Porto I bought some beer from hostel (CATS HOSTEL) and again watched the sunset from Gaia. I later got a small glimpse of the nightlife in Porto, which was understandably a tad tepid. One fascinating phenomenon in Porto were all of these birds flying around at night, creating an eerie image in the sky.
Day 3
For my final day in Porto I opted into something I should have at least considered for day 1: the good ole’ walking tour. As a rule I think walking tours are a great way to orient yourself when you arrive and hopefully you learn something during the tour that takes you down an a different avenue later during your time in a city. Unfortunately they can also be unpredictable in terms of length, and I haven’t yet dulled my social anxiety enough to leave a tour early. Tour guides also tend to have a sense of humor on the Dad Joke Spectrum for which I have little patience.
It was another scorcher of a day as we were herded from one destination to another. One of the most helpful outcomes of the tour was the food I tried throughout the day. There’s Portugal’s famous “Pastel de Nata,” which are these mini custard pies. I also tried Natas do Ceú, which is a delicious layered dessert consisting of egg cream, whipped cream, and crumbled cookies on the bottom. Porto’s most famous dish is the francesinha and I decided I needed to try it.
The francesinha is a twist on the croque madame and it translates to “Little French Thing” in Portuguese. It purports to be a sandwich and technically has all the components of a sandwich with bread, cheese, and piles of meat. It’s served hot, covered with gravy, and often served with french fries. When you put a franceshina in your mouth there is so much going on your tastebuds don’t even know how to process what you’re consuming. I had no problems finishing it, although some people might tell you to skip a meal before and/or after you eat a franceshina. In retrospect it maybe wasn’t the smartest thing to eat just days before I was supposed to be in a bathing suit on the French Riviera.
