“I had been drawn to Portugal by word of how splendid the area around the Douro is,” said Frank Bruni in The New York Times. This “enchanted region” in the country’s north, which follows the river of the same name, rivals Tuscany for beauty—and for wine. The countryside is “alternately craggy and lush, terraced and cleanly diagonal,” the slopes of the valley a “precipitous, mesmerizing patchwork of greens, reds, browns, and grays.” Running along the base of those slopes is the Douro itself—“narrow, wide, greenish, grayish, roiling, calm, and never, in any two places, exactly the same.”
I first caught sight of the river in Oporto, a city in northwestern Portugal that’s the “tipsy mother of its namesake product, Port.” In Oporto, you can pass buildings from several different centuries in just a few blocks, and the “bold, sudden architectural contrasts” are startling. I wandered the Praça da Liberdade, a square whose 19th-century “beaux-arts flourishes recall Paris at its prettiest.” Half a mile down the road, I stumbled upon the rococo facade of the 16th-century Igreja da Misericórdia, a beautiful baroque church that reminded me of Rome. I then strolled down the Rua das Flores, a charming little street with low-slung buildings covered with painted tiles that have “faded to a subtle, exquisite beauty.”
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