We visited Porto as the first leg of our Portugal & Spain trip. We knew that Barcelona would be hot, but we hoped that Porto would be the fresh part of the trip and get us more opportunities to walk arond the city. Unfortunately, Porto also turned out to be too hot.

Boeira Garden Hotel

We were exhausted by the time we arrived in Porto. We took a taxi to the hotel, which only came out to 11 euros after a promotional 40% discount. For some reason, Bolt gave us five 40% discounts for three days followed by another five 37% discounts to be used within Portugal. We got pretty lucky with taxi costs. Our driver, however, was stuck in the “loop” traffic between the airport and rideshare pickup spot, and it took him 20 minutes to get to the designated pickup spot. The air was so fresh! Very breezy while relatively warm with the sunlight.

The hotel is an urban oasis of sorts. It is in the middle of the city but it’s shielded from the traffic by a layer of trees and parking space. I imagine it’s a popular staycation spot for people living here. 

The hotel has a beautiful photo highlighted in its website that shows an iconic yellow house and some chairs behind a magical reflecting blue hue surface. I couldn’t quite that tell what was going on with this photo. Is there a lake in front of the hotel? Is this a shallow pool in front of the hotel and we have to take our shoes off and walk barefoot to enter the hotel? Is this glass?

When we arrived at the hotel the mystery was solved. The hotel’s pool is in front of a yellow house. The yellow house is not the main hotel building. The pool bar is partially housed in the building. What’s in the rest of the building, we don’t know. The pool is actually pretty small but they used some crazy fishbowl lens to make the pool look magical and captured every line from the pool floor tiles. I joked “the owners live in the house”. We went to the back of this house at night, and we saw an address signage, someone’s name on the door and a large foyer area with all lights turned off. I guess we’ll never know.. or do we?

We decided to take it easy the first day and just stick around the hotel. We stayed in the pool for an hour, looked around the spa facilities and the hotel grounds. This hotel has a pretty labyrinthine layout. The basics are simple – the main lobby and restaurant in the main building, the pool and pool bar in another building, and gym and spa/indoor pool on Floor -2. Floor -2 has rooms.. those are rooms with the 100 numbering. Our room was on Floor 2 (not minus 2), and had numbers in the 400 range. In our building, floor 3 had four suites.

From the spa/meeting floor (-2), there was a random, unlabeled staircase going up to the ground level. There’s a little garden area between the two guest room buildings and a children’s playground. Sand, swings, jungle gym. From what we could see, the only way to access this space is by going to floor -2 and then taking the stairs up that by all appearances look like service stairs. Of course, the playground was deserted. Who would want to be so far from the pool? I never saw anyone use this except on our last day, when there was a family using the swings.

The pool was pretty active with hotel guests. Every once in a while, a seagull would graze by and drink water from the pool. If they are drinking water, maybe they also take a bath at night when there are no people? Every day, there was a baby seagull that would show up and start following its parent and loudly asking for food.

There’s also a “garden room” that is an event room of sorts, a winery inside the hotel running its own business, and a giant wine bottle-shaped green structure that is not described anywhere. We never got to see what that one was about.

We went to the hotel restaurant, Raices, for dinner. Before showing us the menu, they offered us “couvert” bread and water, but we had no idea what the price was.. we hoped they would be complimentary, but nope, they were 5 euros each. We got the Caldo Verde soup, chicken breast with curry, and a “brisket” that turned out to be a nice steak. The prices were on the high end but not exorbitant. I thought it was a strange choice to describe the Caldo Verde on the menu simply as “traditional Portuguese cabbage soup”, even though it included thin slices of chorizo. Chorizo would be relevant information for vegetarians.

City Center

We went to sleep around 10pm. At 2am, I woke up and started with my usual whirlwind of thoughts, and eventually just decided to get up at 3am and started blogging and playing videogames. Christine ended up waking up as well and was playing Stardew Valley. We were finally ready to go back to sleep at 6am. When the alarm went off at 8am, we were pretty tired so we decided to just skip breakfast. 

That was fine.. but waking up on Saturday at 2pm was not. OMG, we completely failed to adjust to the time zone. We took the light rail to the city center, briefly checked out the Bolhao Market, had bifana, Francesinha and pastel de nata for lunch. I was hoping we could lounge around coffeeshops. But outside there were some smokers, and we had to sit inside. And inside was hot. We came back at 4pm to cool down in the pool.

We set out to fix the time zone situation. We put on sleep masks, went to sleep at 12am and on Sunday, struggled to get up at 8am, but made it to breakfast. We headed out to the city center and this time walked to Cais da Ribeira. Christine was hoping that the tents in Cais that we could see from up on the bridge were craft stores, but they turned out to be restaurants and beer places. It was only 85 max this day, but I was drenched and drained walking around. We had some ice cream and got on the funicular. We went to the Pingo Doce supermarket and got drinks, rotisserie chicken, and a made-to-order pasta. The supermarket has a whole restaurant section where you pick the ingredients and the workers make the food in front of you. All their items looked really good. We took this to the hotel and had it as lunch. I had been sweating so much that I was feeling weak when we returned. As we lay down in bed, my soul was barely holding on.

Most streets that we came across were cobblestone streets. Christine’s feet starting hurting – something was off with her sandal shoes. We walked into a store by the tram station, got new shoes and ditched the old one. The store is run by a Chinese-speaking family, Christine was chatting a bit with the daughter. As she was about to purchase, the father said “hey are we sure that this is the price? Check again” and claimed that the shoe belongs in the 10 EUR category instead of the 20 EUR category. Nice, we got a.. uh what would this be called? A chinese discount.

River boat tour

We took a nap and then headed out to a river boat & wine tasting tour at 6:30pm. I booked it through Airbnb using the balance I had been accruing using the Amex Business Gold statement credits. I had a brief chance to talk with one guy in our group who had taken the time to read my public Airbnb profile. He asked a little bit about points and the card churning & points game. There were twelve of us. They split us in two boats and our boat had six people. 

Our tour guide gave us a brief overview of Portugal’s history and how Porto had evolved through the years. When he seemed a bit excited about how Portugal “made it in history” by expanding into Africa and establishing colonies I had to bite my tongue, lol.

The thing that strikes me the most about Porto is that there is a river south of the old city, but very little of the city is at the river level. Its core is above a cliff hundreds of feet above the water level. It’s just a vertical climb from the river up into the city. River cities aren’t usually like this – they have good arable land and towns easily accessible from the boat, and grow from there. And usually, rivers in cities aren’t this deep down from the ground level. Apparently, it’s because Porto stands over very hard granite, and the river didn’t get a chance to broaden over time. Instead, it just cut deeper and deeper narrowly into the bedrock. If an invading army came from the south, all Porto had to defend would be its fishing and harbor area and they would be set. We saw some abandoned stone houses in ruins built against the cliff wall. The tour guide explained that it was poor people who couldn’t afford to live in the city.. but what made them abandon the area? Were they evicted? The tour guide said they belong to the state now. It didn’t seem like that area would get either electricity or water service in modern times. There were also some church buildings/convents over a very remote cliff. They were abandoned (evicted?) and currently used by the army as barracks.

Right next to it, there was a lot of new development, expensive condos, and hotels. Our taxi driver told us he knew an English guy who bought a condo near the cliffs for 300k euros and that it tripled in value over 20 years. If the people had held on to their land for a couple hundred years, could they have hit the real estate jackpot? We could see building cranes everywhere along the river. There seems to be a construction boom, but it also doesn’t seem like the city is doing that well economically. The city has to balance its cultural heritage with development.

Throughout the tour, they gave us delicious wines, breads, charcuterie, cheeses, cookies. They explained to us that Port wine tends to be very strong (20 to 25 degrees) because historically when they were supplying wine to the British navy to be sent to the colonies or to wars, the wines had to last a long time, and they managed to do that by mixing the grapes with brandy during fermentation.

Matosinhos

On Monday, we decided to go to Matosinhos, the beach town for people in Porto. This was the hottest day during our stay at 95 degrees. I figured it was a good opportunity to escape the city heat. I started off by taking the D line light rail at 11am, but it was very hot and stuffy. When we reached Trindade station and transferred to the A line that goes to Matosinhos, the train was very full. This was going to be a painful 30-minute ride to the beach. We changed plans and called a taxi from there. Even the taxi was hot as it rode across the city.

Matosinhos was much chillier and breezier than the city center. We went to a juice shop to catch our breath. We had run out of water and we were exhausted. We refilled our water bottle. Then we found a barbershop next door. I took the opportunity to get a haircut. Then we walked to the beach.

We happened to visit during low tide, and there were large rocks with sand in between. It was an ideal spot to explore the tide pools. We saw crabs, mini shrimps, anemones. Strangely, the beach was not cold – when walking by the shore, we could feel how the cold water from the ocean was mixing with warm water. Where was the warm water coming from? There was a continuous stream of water running down the sand over the entire width of the beach, starting from the point of high tide. But where was that water coming from? That’s a mystery to me. There was seemingly no source of the water above the high tide mark. It was like water was emanating from the ground. There was one area in which we could see a pipe (presumably city sewage – or processed sewage) flowing into the sand, but that didn’t explain how there was water over the entire expanse of the beach. This water would heat up under the sun and keep the shore lukewarm.

Christine found a four-legged starfish, and showed it to two boys who were also there looking at marine animals. The boys got very excited shouting out to show it to their dad, and tried to find crabs of their own as well. They were visiting from Britain.

Then we headed to Rua Roberto Ivens which is where all the seafood restaurants are gathered. We tried to get to O Gaveto first, as we had seen it recommended. When I looked up their reservations table in May, Gaveto didn’t have reservations available for all of August, but I thought we could try to walk in. Turns out that the restaurant was closed, as were half of the restaurants in the area, during “Summer Holidays”, as locals go out of town on vacation. We went to Marisqueira Antiga instead. It had a Michelin star in 2018 and is currently a Michelin-recommended restaurant. The items were very expensive – I saw a “Seafood Tower” option for four people priced at 550 euros. 

We focused on the main highlight item, lobster rice (Arroz caldoso de Lavagante Azul da costa), and added one entree of prawns (Carabineiros do Algarve salteados). I think they need to give the loster rice dish some pretentious name for the English menu. A name using proper nouns, not common nouns. I can’t fault people for remembering the other Spanish dish that shall not be named but failing to recall “lobster rice”. Because how is a dish going to be called “lobster rice”? It’s got to be something like “le lobster d’porto” or something.

Both dishes were delicious. They threw our impression that food in Portugal was average out the window. The lobster rice is similar to that other Spanish dish that shall not be named, but it’s much more broth-heavy and the broth is very rich. We ended up having this Portuguese rice twice. On Monday we had Lobster Rice in Antiga for 90 euros and on Tuesday we returned and had Seafood Rice in the more casual Marújo for 35 euros.

We returned to the hotel at 4pm. I was feeling pretty sore, so I spent some time in the underground pool getting hydromassages and took a nap on the floaties. That helped.

On Tuesday, we did laundry in a nearby coin laundromat and took the taxi to Praia Leça da Palmeira (just north of Matosinhos beach) where the Piscina das Marés is located. There was a long 40-person line in front of the pool. We skipped it and headed to the beach. People were crowded above the high tide mark with their parasols and towels, tanning in the sun.

We walked around the tide pools again. This area had even larger rocks with paths of sand in between. Some rocks retained water from the high tide and the water was slowly falling into ponds of various sizes formed in lower areas. Parents were playing with their babies in these areas. There wasn’t a source of city water either. It just happened. There were some cool areas with mini nooks in the rocks where you were isolated from the crowd.

Then we returned to the hotel at 4pm and used the pools to recover again. I spent some time blogging in the hotel lobby area, which was a bit hot, so I sat in the hotel bar outdoor area for half an hour. It was very fresh and there were no mosquitoes biting me.

That concluded our visit to Porto. We didn’t get to see much of the city with the heatwave and almost left with the impression that food here was not very good, giving us Chile vibes. But the lobster rice saved the day.

The next day, we flew to Barcelona.