Essential Porto: A Self-Guided Walking Tour of Hills, Granite and the Douro Essential Porto is a first-timer's flagship walk through the UNESCO-listed historic center of Porto, Portugal. This tour covers twenty stops, from Avenida dos Aliados and Estação de São Bento at the top of the city down through Terreiro da Sé and Rua das Flores to the Ribeira and the Ponte Luiz I. Eight further chapters cover the city as a whole, from the Bronze Age occupation traced on the cathedral hill to the practical business of running a World Heritage site where thousands of people still live. About This Porto Walking Tour The broad stone terrace in front of Porto's cathedral looks like the oldest open ground in the city, yet most of it dates from 1940, when demolitions around the Sé cleared away houses that had covered the hill for centuries. Planners had made a comparable decision a few streets north, where the granite avenue of Avenida dos Aliados required major clearance of earlier city fabric in the early twentieth century. Those two clearances are two of the twenty stops on this tour. Central Porto took its present shape from a long contest over who controlled the ground between the cathedral hill and the river. In 1325 King Afonso the Fourth ordered a royal complex built in the lower city for customs and other Crown business, a direct challenge to the bishop's authority over that quarter, and the building survives as Casa do Infante. Foreign merchants settled around the same commercial streets, and British trading houses in particular became increasingly prominent from the late medieval period onward. Builders used granite quarried around the region for church walls and ordinary houses alike, which is why so much of the center is grey. Nineteenth-century builders turned to iron for the spans and open interiors granite could not deliver, and the Ponte Luiz I is the most dramatic result. Members of the Sinédrio, working with jurists and merchants of the city, launched the Liberal Revolution from Porto in 1820 with a demand for representative government and a constitution. Twelve years later, fire during the Siege of Porto destroyed much of the Franciscan convent beside Igreja de São Francisco; the church itself was left standing, and the merchants' institution that acquired the burned ground built Palácio da Bolsa on it. In the early hours of 31 January 1891, soldiers and republican activists in Porto proclaimed a republic and moved military units through the streets, years before the monarchy ended. The Route Through Porto The stops range from Avenida dos Aliados at the top of the city down to the Ponte Luiz I at the river, and each one stands on its own. Avenida dos Aliados : a monumental granite avenue, largely built in the early twentieth century.Estação de São Bento : the tiled station, and the tunnels it took to bring railway tracks into a steep, already built city.Praça da Batalha : an open square where the Porta do Cimo de Vila once controlled who passed.Igreja de Santa Clara : a restrained granite exterior beside surviving medieval walls, with fifteenth-century bones.Muralha Fernandina : the surviving wall at Guindais, and why the medieval city spread beyond it.Terreiro da Sé : the cathedral, the episcopal palace, and a terrace cleared within living memory.Rua das Flores : cut in the early sixteenth century to reach the commercial quarter around São Domingos.Clérigos : the tower everyone photographs, and the brotherhood of priests who built it.Livraria Lello : a bookshop whose theatrical 1906 building was designed by Francisco Xavier Esteves.Carmo & Carmelitas : two churches, two institutions, and the narrow sliver of building between them.Cadeia da Relação : one granite building that held a high court and a prison at once.Miradouro da Vitória : the second of the two hills that shaped the historic city.Vitória & the Jewish Quarter : the Olival quarter King João the First ordered created in the late fourteenth century.Infante & Palácio da Bolsa : a merchants' palace raised on ground burned during the siege of 1832.Igreja de São Francisco : gilded inside, medieval Gothic in its structure.Casa do Infante : the royal customs complex King Afonso the Fourth ordered in 1325.Praça & Cais da Ribeira : documented as a market by the late fourteenth century.Ponte Luiz I : the crossing that had to answer distance and steep elevation at once. You'll Learn About… Why the ancient-looking terrace in front of the Sé is younger than the automobile, and what stood on the cathedral hill before 1940.How King Afonso the Fourth used a customs house in 1325 to push royal authority into a quarter the bishop controlled.What Charles Shaw, a foreign volunteer fighting for the constitutional cause, recorded about the Siege of Porto in his 1837 memoir, written by a man repeatedly under fire.What happened in the early hours of 31 January 1891, when soldiers and republican activists proclaimed a republic in Porto.Why the Fernandine wall once ringed the whole expanding medieval city, and what its gates and posterns let the authorities regulate.How granite quarried around the region turned up in church walls and ordinary houses alike, and what iron made possible for nineteenth-century builders. Who It's For This is the flagship walk for a first-time visitor to Porto who wants the famous places along with the reasons they look the way they do. It covers the ground from the tiled hall at Estação de São Bento to the upper deck of the Ponte Luiz I, and it suits travelers who like knowing which parts of a city were built, which were cleared away, and who made the call. Practical Details There are twenty stops across Porto's historic center, with Avenida dos Aliados at the top of the city and the Ribeira at the river. Two to four hours is comfortable, longer if you go inside the churches and the bookshop. The audio is self-guided, so you can begin at any stop, break for a francesinha, and come back to it later. The streets down to the Douro are steep and cobbled, so wear shoes you can walk hills in. Take the Tour Download the app and take Essential Porto with you, from the top of Aliados down to the Douro, at whatever pace suits your day.
