(written 22/3/2006 in Granada, EspaƱa, by
Liz)
Up early the next morning, we made ourselves some tea, and then decided we would walk into Porto, as our campground was only about 4kms from the center of town. We stopped about halfway for a refresher of coffee and the addictive pastel de nata (portuguese custard tart), and then continued on our way.
Once we made it to the center of town, we took a while to find the bridge we were looking for, but eventually managed to locate it, and crossed the top section of it, getting nice sunny views of Porto and the river as we went.
On the other side of the river we spent a while looking back across to the other bank from what appeared to be an old fortress high up above the bridge we had crossed, before making our way through some gardens and then down through more of the narrow winding streets.
We were on the hunt for an open Port house, being part of what this city was famous for. After a while wandering around, we eventually stumbled across
Taylor Fladgate which turned out to be a British owned Port House.
We sat at their funky little table and chairs (all made out of old barrels), and enjoyed a taste of white port while we waited for a tour of the port house.
None of the port is actually made in Porto, it is stored there though, so our tour took us through one of the storehouses. We learnt all about where the port is grown, how it is made, and what the difference is between a vintage port and other port. It was all interesting, as a lot of the information we were given was new to us.
After the tour, we were given another tasting, this time of a ruby port. We made our way out to the terrace where we enjoyed the
view and our port, before heading inside to the restaurant.
We had a big and mostly tasty lunch, before walking the rest of the way down the hill to the watersedge. Along the way, we stopped in another port house where we did a tasting, but we didn't like the flavour of this port much compared to the first port house.
Down by the river, we sat in the sun and spent a while being lazy. Then we went back across the bridge, this time along the lower section, climbed back up the hill on the other side, and caught a bus back to our camping ground.
After our big lunch, we decided we would have a smaller dinner, so we bought a few things from the nearby supermarket. We had a bit of a walk around our campground, where we came across an ornamental lake with a little castle on the island in the middle of the water, fed some hungry ducks our stale bread, cooked ourselves some soup on our little camp stove, and then put our tired bodies to bed.