Porto: The First Night

We landed in Porto on the afternoon of December 22nd with no plan other than to walk until the city made sense. That is always the right first move in a new city — not the hotel, not the restaurant reservation, not the itinerary app. The walk. Porto rewards it immediately: ten minutes from any central street you are at the Douro, and the Douro tells you everything you need to know about where you are.

The river is the spine of Porto. The city rises behind you on steep granite hills — the Ribeira waterfront at water level, the terracotta rooftops of the medieval quarter climbing above, the towers of the Sé Cathedral and Clérigos above those. Across the river, on the Vila Nova de Gaia bank, the port wine lodges line the hillside in white-and-terracotta rows, their names in large letters facing the river as they have for three hundred years. Sandeman. Graham's. Taylor's. Ferreira. The whole trade done in the open, across the water, where everyone can see it. That is very Portuguese.

We stood on the Gaia bank as the sky went from blue to violet to the specific colour that only happens in December near the Atlantic — a pink-orange you do not see inland. Ponte Luis I, the 19th-century double-deck iron bridge designed by a student of Gustave Eiffel and completed in 1886, began its nightly transformation. During the day it is an impressive piece of Victorian engineering. At dusk it becomes something else entirely. I want to tell you about the fifteen minutes I almost missed. I had been shooting all day. I almost went back to the hotel. I didn't. The bridge turned purple. The sky turned pink. Some places only reveal themselves when the light is leaving. Porto is one of them.

The next morning we drove north to Braga — Portugal's oldest continuously occupied city, called Bracara Augusta by the Romans who made it the capital of the entire province of Gallaecia. Evidence of that occupation survives everywhere: inscription fragments built into medievalwalls, a ruined forum under a shopping street, a cathedral that has been reconstructed on the same foundation for nine hundred years. History here does not feel historical. It feels geological.

Bom Jesus do Monte rises above Braga on a forested hill, accessible by one of the oldest hydraulic funicular railways in the world — still running on the same counterbalance principle it used when it opened in 1882 — or by a Baroque staircase that runs 116 metres of elevation in a zigzag of stone saints, allegorical fountains, and chapels representing the five senses, the three virtues, and the stations of the cross. The Portuguese built it to make the pilgrimage as theatrical as possible. It works completely. The climb takes about twenty minutes and every landing gives you something to look at: a moss-covered fountain pouring from a stone mouth, a chapel with a painted ceiling visible through an iron gate, the city of Braga spreading below you at each turn.

I had been shooting since we arrived in Portugal. By 7pm I was done — done with the camera, done with the walk, ready to find dinner and stop looking through glass. My wife said we should stay on the Gaia bank until the lights came on. I said ten more minutes. That is the negotiation that produces the best photographs of any trip: the person who isn't carrying the equipment understanding, correctly, that the light is not finished, and the person with the equipment too tired to see it clearly.

Ponte Luis I takes about twelve minutes to fully transform. There is a point around minute eight where it is neither one thing nor the other — the sky still pale enough that the artificial light hasn't won, the iron still more gunmetal than gold. I had packed the camera. I unpacked it. 41mm, f/5.6, ISO 1250, 1/100s — slightly underexposed to hold the colour in the sky above the bridge. The twelve minutes are the photograph. If I had gone back to the hotel at minute seven I would have a photograph of an interesting bridge. I stayed for twelve. It's a different photograph.

First dinner in Porto was at Taberna dos Mercadores on the Rua dos Mercadores, a block off the Ribeira waterfront — low ceilings, marble tables, the kind of Portuguese restaurant that does not have a wine list because the wine is decided by the kitchen and arrives without you asking. The bacalhau à brás came in a copper pan: salt cod shredded with eggs and onion and fried potato, the texture somewhere between a hash and a scramble, a dish that has been feeding Porto since the 16th century. My son, who had arrived with reasonable scepticism about dried salt cod as a foundation for dinner, finished the entire pan. December, 8pm, the bridge visible down the street through the restaurant window, still gold.

The ginjinha stands near the Ribeira sell sour cherry liqueur in small chocolate cups for one euro. That was the first drink in Portugal — standing on the waterfront in the cold, the bridge lighting up across the water. You drink the ginjinha, you eat the cup, and you immediately understand something about how Portugal approaches pleasure: simply, directly, without ceremony and without apology.

Later that evening, at a Gaia lodge with the Douro below and the Ribeira lit across the water, a 10-year Tawny the colour of old amber — dried apricot, roasted walnut, a finish that outlasted the conversation. Port wine is not a dessert wine to the Portuguese. It is a Thursday evening drink, a cold-night drink, a bridge-lit-up-across-the-river drink. Order it before dinner at the lodge cellars on the Gaia hillside, where they will pour it at the right temperature and explain why, and they will be right.

— ABE CAPETILLO  ·  ROAD & GLASS  ·  PORTO, DECEMBER 2024
First issue from Portugal — the bridge turned purple and the Tawny was correct. Seven more issues to come.