An Unplanned Year

We started our time in Porto at the Conservas Pinhais factory, for a tour. The family owned business has been operating since 1920. Every day (during sardine season) they go and buy the fresh sardines in an auction at the market at 4am. The fish are taken to the factory, cleaned and prepared, cooked and canned on the same day. Every fish and can is packed by hand, then when ready, each can is also wrapped by hand.

We got to wrap a personalised tin.

The tour finished with a sardine tasting plate and a glass of wine…at 10am.

It was such an interesting tour. We even watched an award winning tourism video that is part of the tour. You can watch it here.

We went from there to the centre of town and wandered for a bit.

We then joined a food tour which was a fun, social afternoon eating some favourite Portuguese dishes and sampling wines, beers and port along the way. We ate bifana, cod, sardines, jamon, chorizo, the most amazing Pastel de nata, Patanisca de baccalaureate and Alheira.

We tried a Vinho Verde (green wine, but it’s not really green, it comes from the Verde region of Portugal) and white Port! It was such a fun afternoon.

We started our second day in Porto early and wandered the streets toward the riverside before descending a huge number of steps down to the riverside.

We crossed the Luis 1 bridge and located the mooring of our river cruise provider. We jumped on to enjoy the “Six bridges boat cruise”, but only saw & were told about 5. Not sure what happened there. Maybe #6 was the freelance bridge we saw in the distance, or the one still under construction with no spans across the river yet.

We saw 9 river cruise boats moored along the river, it seems that in summer the Duoro river is a popular river cruise location. Who knew!

We then dragged ourselves up the steep hill to the Taylor’s Wine Cellars for a self-guided tour and port tasting.

The tour was really interesting and included a lot of information about the Duoro Valley where they’ve had vineyards for over 400 years, a giant 7m diameter vat and noted that they still do their first press of grapes by foot!

We then did a tasting of three ports, a dry white, a regular ruby and an aged tawny port. Obviously we now know the difference between all of these because we did the tour. However, neither of us finished all three tastings, poor form I know, but was still before lunchtime!

We then headed back to our accommodation using the funicular to avoid going back up the ridiculous number of steps we came down and taking an easy afternoon out of the drizzle, attended to some admin (booking accom).