Porto & the North

Overview

The saying goes that Porto works, Braga prays, Coimbra studies and Lisbon gets the money, and the north is the part of Portugal that has always felt hard done by in that arrangement. It is granite, green and wet, it drinks a young fizzy wine the rest of the country thinks of as a summer drink, and it is where the state was invented: Guimarães, where Afonso Henriques was acclaimed the first king in 1140, still puts “here Portugal was born” on the old town wall.

Three landscapes share the chapter. The Minho, between Porto and the Galician border, is the crowded, farmed, church-heavy coast and valleys of Braga, Guimarães and Viana do Castelo, with vinho verde on every trellis and a saint’s-day romaria in every parish through the summer. The Douro valley east of Porto is the terraced port-wine country, demarcated in the 1750s and UNESCO-listed, with a railway that follows the river for three hours to Pocinho. Beyond it, Trás-os-Montes, “behind the mountains”, is the empty north-east of Bragança and Miranda do Douro, where the bagpipe survived, a second language is official, and the sausages are the point of the trip.

Porto itself, the second city, is a working port piled up a gorge above the river with the lodges of Vila Nova de Gaia facing it, a UNESCO historic centre since 1996 and a reputation, among its own people, for being a nation apart. Most visitors stay there and day-trip; the region rewards the ones who keep going.

History & character

Bracara Augusta and the Suebi

Braga was Bracara Augusta, a Roman city and the capital of the north-western province, and its diocese, founded in the 3rd century, is one of the oldest in the peninsula and the base from which the region was Christianised. Chaves, inland, was Aquae Flaviae, a spa town on the Roman road whose bridge still carries traffic. After Rome, the Suebi made Braga the capital of their kingdom, and the Iron Age hill forts (castros) that dot the Minho, Briteiros above Guimarães the largest of them, are the layer beneath all of it.

The county that became a country

The County of Portugal was a border district of the Kingdom of León governed from Guimarães, and its story is the country’s origin myth. The castle there was built in the 10th century on the orders of the countess Mumadona Dias to protect her monastery from Moors and Norsemen; Afonso Henriques defeated his mother’s army at São Mamede outside the town in 1128, was acclaimed king there in 1140. Braga’s archbishops and Porto’s merchants were the other two powers of the medieval north, and both cities still carry the roles.

Port, the English and the Douro

The wine trade made the region’s second fortune. English merchants settled in Porto after the Methuen Treaty of 1703 opened the British market to Portuguese wine, and the Douro upstream was demarcated by the Marquis of Pombal in the 1750s, one of the first regulated wine regions anywhere, to stop the trade adulterating what it shipped. The terraces were cut by hand into schist over two centuries, the wine came downriver in flat rabelo boats, and the lodges across the water in Gaia, Cálem, Ferreira, Sandeman, Kopke and the rest, still carry the merchant names. The Anglo-Portuguese habit outlasted the trade: Porto’s middle class was bourgeois and English-facing rather than aristocratic, which is the usual explanation for why the city regards itself as the no-nonsense economic heart of the country and Lisbon as the place that spends the money.

Emigration and the empty interior

The 19th and 20th centuries emptied the mountains. Trás-os-Montes and the upper Minho sent their sons to Brazil and later to France, and the villages that remain are old, stone and quiet; the isolation is also why the region kept its bagpipe, the gaita transmontana, and its second language, Mirandese, an Asturleonese tongue spoken around Miranda do Douro and given official status by parliament in 1999. The coast went the other way: Braga’s university, founded in 1973, turned the city into the country’s technology cluster, and Porto’s airport became the second hub for TAP and the low-cost carriers, which is why the north now receives more visitors than it has beds for in June.

See & do

Porto’s historic centre

The UNESCO zone runs from the Ribeira quays up through the old streets to the cathedral, a Romanesque fortress-church that is among the oldest buildings in the city. The Church of São Francisco is the city’s main Gothic monument, its interior entirely covered in gilded baroque carving. Next to it, the Palácio da Bolsa, the 19th-century stock exchange built by the merchants’ association, is visited for its Arab Room. The Clérigos bell tower is 75 m tall, visible from most of the city and climbable, open daily 9 to 7. São Bento station’s entrance hall is lined with azulejo panels of Portuguese history, free to walk into at any hour a train is running; Livraria Lello, the ornate bookshop a few streets away, now runs a ticketed queue.

Braga’s sanctuaries and Guimarães

Bom Jesus do Monte is the north’s most photographed staircase, a baroque zigzag of chapels and fountains climbing to a hilltop church, with a funicular that has run on water ballast since the 19th century and is the oldest of its kind still working. Sameiro, higher on the same ridge, is the Marian shrine with the view. In the city, the cathedral opens daily and its treasury is on a guided tour. In Guimarães, the castle and the Ducal Palace share one hilltop and one ticket office.

The Douro

The Alto Douro Wine Region is a UNESCO landscape of hand-built schist terraces along about 100 km of river from Mesão Frio to Pocinho, and the way to see it is slowly: the train, a boat from Régua, or a car on the N222 south bank road between Régua and Pinhão. The quintas take visitors for tastings and lunch, and the vintage in September and October is the season to be there. At the far end, the Côa valley rock engravings, reached from Vila Nova de Foz Côa, are the other World Heritage site on the line.

Peneda-Gerês

The national park, the country’s only one, covers 696 km² of granite mountains on the Galician border, with deer, wild horses, wolves and birds of prey in oak and pine forest, and no entry fee. The spa village of Gerês is the base, with marked trails from the tourist office: the PR3 loop, five hours up through forest to a viewpoint over the reservoir and across a plateau where the horses graze, and the two-hour PR10 “lazy trail” through the woods. The stone villages of the Peneda side are for a second day with a car.

Coast and festivals

The Costa Verde beaches north of Porto, Matosinhos, Póvoa de Varzim, Esposende and Viana’s Cabedelo, are wide, cold and good for surf, with Blue Flags along most of the strip. The summer romarias are the region’s real events: São João in Porto and Braga on 23 June, Braga Romana in late May, Nossa Senhora da Agonia in Viana in August, and the music festivals at Paredes de Coura and Vilar de Mouros, two of the oldest in the country.

Towns & cities

Porto

Porto is the reason most people come north and it is small enough to walk, if you accept that the walk is vertical. The Ribeira quayside at the bottom, the cathedral on the cliff above it and the six bridges across to Gaia, with the double-deck Luís I in the middle, make the postcard; the Baixa behind holds the Clérigos tower, the tiled hall of São Bento station, the gilded São Francisco church, the Palácio da Bolsa and the Bolhão market. Out along Boavista is Rem Koolhaas’s Casa da Música, opened in 2005; at the river mouth, Foz do Douro is where the city goes at sunset. Two or three nights is right, with a day for the lodges in Gaia and a day for the Douro.

Braga

Braga is the “city of archbishops”, 40 minutes from Porto by train, with a cathedral nearly a thousand years old, a compact historic centre of churches and old shops, and a student quarter around the University of Minho. Its two hilltop sanctuaries face the city from the east: Bom Jesus do Monte, the baroque church at the top of a monumental zigzag staircase, with a water-balance funicular for those who would rather not climb, and Sameiro higher up. Holy Week processions and the São João festivities on 23 June are the two dates the city builds its year around.

Guimarães

Guimarães is the cradle of the nation and knows it: the 10th-century castle, the Palace of the Dukes of Braganza beside it and a medieval centre that has been a World Heritage site since 2001 and was European Capital of Culture in 2012. The Largo da Oliveira is the square to sit in. A cable car climbs Penha, the mountain above the town, for the view. Trains from Porto run hourly and take about an hour and a quarter; from Braga, oddly, the bus is quicker than the train, which has to double back through Lousado.

Viana do Castelo

Viana do Castelo sits where the Lima meets the sea, under the hill of Santa Luzia and its basilica, with an old town of Gothic and baroque facades, an iron bridge over the river by Gustave Eiffel’s company and beaches, Cabedelo for surf and Norte for calmer water, ten minutes from the centre. It is the capital of Portuguese gold filigree, and the Romaria de Nossa Senhora da Agonia in the third week of August, with its parade of regional costume and gold, is the biggest folk festival in the Minho.

The Minho towns

Ponte de Lima, upriver from Viana, is the oldest vila in the country, named for its medieval bridge, with a rural market twice a month. Barcelos, between Braga and the coast, is the ceramics town whose painted rooster became the national souvenir and whose Thursday market is the largest weekly rural market in Portugal. Valença, on the border, keeps a complete set of 17th-century fortifications facing Tui across the river; Caminha and Vila Nova de Cerveira are the quieter river towns between them.

The Douro and Trás-os-Montes

Peso da Régua is the railway and river town at the heart of the port country, with the Douro Museum; Lamego above it is the small historic city on the south bank; Vila Real has the Mateus palace of the wine label; Pinhão, further up, is the prettiest stop on the line. Beyond the mountains, Bragança has a walled citadel and castle, Chaves its Roman bridge and spa, Mirandela its alheira sausages, and Miranda do Douro, on the Spanish border above the river canyon, its cathedral and the Mirandese language.

Whichever way you travel it, the valley needs a night: the light on the terraces is best in the early morning and at dusk, and the last train back to Porto leaves Pinhão before either.

Food & drink

The north eats more, heavier and earlier than the south, and it drinks the country’s two most distinctive wines. Vinho verde, the young, light, faintly sparkling white of the Minho, is made only here, in a DOC region that grew out of the old province in 1908, and is what goes with the grilled fish, the seafood and the heat. Port, the fortified wine of the Douro terraces, is aged across the river from Porto in Gaia and tasted there by the glass; the same valley now makes as much unfortified Douro red as port, and the reds are the better value on a restaurant list.

Porto’s plates are the heavy ones. The francesinha is the city’s invention, a sandwich of steak, ham and sausage under melted cheese with a beer-and-tomato sauce, eaten with chips and, by local insistence, beer rather than wine. Tripas à moda do Porto, tripe stewed with beans and sausage, is the dish that named the city’s people. Bacalhau à Gomes de Sá, cod baked with potato, egg and olives, was invented here too and went national. The old-centre lunch houses serve a three-course prato do dia with bread, house wine, dessert and coffee for a few euros, and the soup, caldo verde more often than not, comes first.

Sweets are convent egg pastry as everywhere, but Porto’s own pastry shops, the pão quente bakeries and pastelarias on every corner, are the cheap breakfast and the cheap afternoon: an espresso, a tosta mista and something with custard for a couple of euros. Arcádia, the chocolatier founded in the city in 1933, is the box to take home.

Nature

Peneda-Gerês is the headline: 696 km² on the border, created in May 1971, the only national park and the oldest protected area in Portugal, paired with Galicia’s Xurés park as a cross-border biosphere reserve. Its ranges, Peneda, Gerês and Larouco, are granite, cut by glacial valleys and dammed rivers, and hold the country’s best-known wolf population, deer, semi-wild horses and the long-horned Barrosã cattle whose farming system the UN recognised as agricultural heritage in 2018.

The Douro is the other landscape, and it is entirely made by hand: the terraces of the wine region are a cultural landscape rather than a wild one, but the river below Miranda do Douro runs through a granite canyon that forms the Douro International Natural Park, shared with Spain, with cliffs on both banks. Trás-os-Montes between the two has the Terras de Cavaleiros geopark, UNESCO-listed for its geology.

Climate

The north is the wet part of Portugal, and the weather is the price of the green. Porto has a semi-Mediterranean pattern pulled cooler and damper by the Atlantic: mild, rainy winters with the odd night below zero, warm rather than hot summers, and occasional August heatwaves that push the city to 40°C. Braga and the Minho valleys are wetter still; the Gerês is among the rainiest corners of the country.

Inland the picture flips. The Douro valley is sheltered from the coast by mountains and cooks in July and August, which is what ripens the port grapes and what makes a midsummer vineyard visit a morning-only affair. Trás-os-Montes has a continental climate of hot summers and cold winters with snow on the higher ground.

Pack a waterproof for any month from October to May, layers for the mountains at any time, and light clothes plus a hat for the Douro in summer. The sea off the Costa Verde is cold enough for wetsuits year-round.

When to go

May, June and September are the months. The rain has mostly stopped, the valleys are green, the Douro is warm but not brutal, and the region’s festival calendar is running: Braga Romana in the last weekend of May, the romarias in every parish through the summer, and São João in Porto and Braga on the night of 23 June, when the whole city is out with plastic hammers, sardines and fireworks. Book Porto well ahead for that week.

November to March is low season everywhere north of Porto: wet, quiet, cheap, and fine for the city, the lodges and the museums, less so for the park or the coast.

Getting there

Porto’s Francisco Sá Carneiro airport, 11 km north-west of the centre, is the second busiest in the country and the north’s front door, with TAP intercontinental flights to Brazil and North America and a heavy low-cost presence led by Ryanair; the metro’s line E runs from the terminal into the city. Direct buses from the airport also run to Braga and Guimarães in under an hour. Vigo and Santiago de Compostela airports across the border are alternatives for the upper Minho.

By train, the Linha do Norte from Lisbon ends at Porto’s Campanhã station in about three hours by Alfa Pendular, and some services continue to Braga and Guimarães, the northernmost stops on the long-distance network; Braga is about 3 h 45 from Lisbon. From Spain the only rail link is the Celta, twice a day between Vigo and Porto.

Getting around

Porto’s metro is a light-rail network running since 2002, underground in the centre and on the surface beyond, with the airport, Matosinhos and Gaia on it; the ticket is a rechargeable card validated at the yellow readers before boarding, and contactless bank cards work on the airport line. Suburban trains from São Bento and Campanhã fan out to Braga (about 40 minutes by fast train), Guimarães (about 1 h 15), Aveiro and Viana, and the Douro line runs from São Bento to Pocinho.

The catch is that the northern lines are spokes from Porto, not a web: Braga to Guimarães or Braga to Viana by train means going back towards Porto and changing, so for those hops the bus is faster. The Minho line continues north from Porto to Valença on the border.

Beyond the Douro, Trás-os-Montes and the Gerês are car country; Rodonorte buses link the towns but on rural timetables. In the cities, Uber and Bolt work in Porto, Braga and Guimarães, e-scooters litter Braga’s centre, and everywhere the historic core is best on foot, with the reminder that Porto’s is steep enough to count as exercise.

Practical info

Time, money, plugs and tipping are covered in the Portugal guide; here is what changes in the north.

Porto’s people are direct. Ask in a bar whether they have a menu and you may get a flat “no” that means the bar does not serve food, not that they are being rude; follow-up questions solve it. Spanish is understood and will be answered, though older locals may point out, politely, which country you are in.

Two documents worth having: the Porto Card, sold by the tourist office, which bundles museum entry and optionally transport, and a validated metro ticket, since the fine for riding without one starts at €100. Braga’s city buses are zoned; Bom Jesus is in the second zone, so the fare differs from the centre.

Galicia is close enough to count as part of the trip: Valença to Tui is a walk across the bridge, and Santiago de Compostela is the end of the Portuguese Way, which starts in Porto and crosses the Ave, Cávado, Neiva, Lima and Minho on its 260 km north.