Porto; Sunday, 29 January, 2023

Another slow start to the day, but I was still early enough to be out of the hotel and across the road to pick up the first open-top sightseeing bus of the morning from it’s starting point. The City Sightseeing service in Porto has two routes and I jumped on the Red route to begin with heading out for a tour round the city and then down to the coast at Cheese Castle before travelling along the Atlantic coastline to the mouth of the Douro and then back into town.

My ticket for the bus also included a free boat cruise on the River Douro, so I hopped off the bus at the penultimate stop and walked down the short distance to the riverside to pick up my boat tour. Much like the open-top tour buses there are several companies all offering exactly the same tour, so it was – if anything – easier to have had the choice of company already made by the purchase of my bus ticket.

The 50 minute tour started by heading upstream under the two Gustave Eiffel designed bridges and two more modern replacement bridges with a glimpse of the motorway bridge in the far distance before turning round and heading back downstream, through the city centre, under the sixth major bridge in the city almost to the mouth of Douro and then turning back round to head back to the start point.

From the landing stage it was a short walk up hill to the centre of the lower part of town to visit the Igreja Monumento de São Francisco or Monument Church of Saint Francis. The church forms part of a complex that was once a Franciscan monastery and the church itself is a perfect example of what happens if you give people unlimited access to gold leaf – every surface on the walls and ceilings are covered in gold leaf, it’s probably by square centimetre the most expensive church interior I’ve ever been into.

Next door to the church are parts of the former monastery building including another small chapel, a museum and down below the tombs and ossuary of the order, which is slightly creepy when set against the opulence of the church upstairs.

From the church I wandered back to the open-top bus stop and picked up the Blue line to complete it’s tour over the Ponte Infante Dom Henrique and down into Vila Nova de Gaia before returning back over the river and ending up back up at the Cathedral.

I paid my small entrance fee to get into the Cathedral to have a look around – though the entrance fee also includes access to the cathedral museum, the double decked cloister with it’s intricate ceramic tiles as well as access up one of the towers of the cathedral for views out over the city, the river and Gaia. I spent quite a bit of time looking round the complex before heading back over to the bus stop in time to make the 16:30 departure.

I’d specifically aimed for that one as looking at the timetable we should have hit Castelo do Queijo and the Atlantic Coast around sunset and hopefully the views should be good. I’d got to the bus stop relatively early as I thought lots of other people would have the same idea, but in the end there were only three of us on the top deck by the time we made it to the coast just after 17:30, 15 minutes before sunset.

Lots of people had the same idea of taking in the views from the coast road, but they were all in their own cars, which meant the bus crawled down the seafront – which was perfect as it meant I got to watch the whole of the sunset as I would have missed the end if the bus had been moving at a more acceptable pace. We reached the mouth of the Douro just as the sun started to disappear behind the horizon as I was able to get some stunning photos of the sun half descended into the sea with the Mole and Lighthouse silhouetted in front of it. The only downside being that once the sun had gone down being on the top-deck of an open-top bus it did suddenly become very noticeable that it was only January.

Back in town I headed back to the hotel and freshened up before heading out for dinner.