Porto, Portugal

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June 29, 30, 2008

PORTO, Portugal

This was a bit of a long drive ( 5 hours ) from Santander through a couple of small mountain ranges to the north coast of Portugal. Our “GPS Lady” ( sometimes referred to as something not so polite ) took us a little off course with some new roads that have been opened that obviously were not on our GPS maps yet. We are getting spoiled and can’t even read a map anymore ! Made it to our destination safe and sound with a diversion through the city of Porto and back north to our resort hotel in Vermar.

Porto is a very big city and obviously a major port. Our resort at Vermar is about 25 KM north of Porto and we were very impressed with this beach area. Lots of high end hotel resorts and many smaller places as well. There are a lot of tourists coming here from other parts of Europe and they have very busy summers. They also get a lot of visitors from Mexico and Central America. The beaches are beautiful ( and large ) with great, fine sand and not too many rocks. Golf is a lot more evident here and in Northern Spain as well. We took a walk through the main town in the evening and were quite impressed with the facilities that are available. I suspect it is pretty dead here after the end of September.

Monday morning we drove into Porto to have a closer look at the main city. This is a good sized city, with very old parts and some very modern. We asked directions of a policeman to a “wine cave” ( bulk storage and retail for wine ) area and he turned his motorbike around and gave us an escorted trip through the old city to get us to where we were going. Now, that’s service.

Port wine is their claim to fame here and nearly all the port wine goes through this city and port. The grapes are actually grown over 100 KM away in a mountain valley but for hundreds of years the juice processing, fermenting, bottling and shipping have been done in Porto. There is some very interesting history regarding the port wine business and we took a very good tour through Grahams Port facility to learn a little more about the way it’s made and matured. ( and of course some samples ). In the old days small ships braved the rapids down from the mountains loaded with wine barrels to get the juice to the facilities in Porto to be mixed with brandy and stored, sometimes for many, many years to become PORT.

We enjoyed a very good typical Portuguese meal in town and spent a quit evening at the resort. All in all a very nice and interesting pace to visit. We’ll be back someday to see a little more and spend a little time on the beach.

Tomorrow we hit the road again for a 5 hour drive to Madrid, Spain.

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