Two Bridges

The first thing we did when we got to Porto was walk downhill. There was really not much other choice. We were staying most of the way up the hill that Porto is built on and our first destination in the city was on the south bank of the Douro River. Which is decidedly not at the top of the hill.

The journey down the hill to the Douro is quite the walk. In most places the hill seems to go about straight down. It is so steep in most spots that paving the path with a sloped surface from point A to point B won't work. Switchbacks and curves and lots and lots and lots of steps are required. And big steps too. Walking down is an awesome voyage of discovery combined with a pretty good workout. But at least it's down. And luckily there are plenty of mechanical contraptions to get you back up to the top on the way back. Thank goodness.

As we made our way down to the Douro while keeping an eye or two firmly on where we were stepping, we caught glimpses of the river and Vila Nova de Gaia on the south bank, home to the region's many Port cellars. And if we were pointed in the right direction at the right time on our trip downhill, we could see pieces of a very large metal arch bridge: the Dom Luís I Bridge.

The Dom Luís I is one of six bridges spanning the Douro connecting Porto to the south side of the river. There are a number of boat tours which leave from the north and south banks of the river that will take you to see all six up close. But the Dom Luís I is one of the best you'll see on that tour. And you don't need to get on a boat to experience it.

First sighting of the Dom Luís I Bridge, Porto.

The Dom Luís is a pedestrian, automobile and Metro bridge. The top deck is reserved for the Metro and pedestrians, and the lower level accommodates automobile as well as more people on foot. The bridge itself is an iron arch supported from massive concrete piers on either end with vertical iron trusses extending upwards from the arch to support the upper deck and downward to support the road and sidewalks of the lower level. 

Its importance to both Porto and Vila Nova de Gaia cannot be understated. It is THE main thoroughfare allowing people whether on foot, Metro or car to cross the Douro River and get from one side to the other. Each time we crossed it (four times, if you must know) it was packed. I'm sure a ton of those people crossing were tourists like us but I'm guessing there were a fair number of locals also. 

But it is not just functional. The bridge is also visually stunning. Not only is it sort of a true expression of its own structure with the clear span arch so obviously supporting the two decks via the connecting trusses, but the top deck is also narrower than the roadway, which causes the arch to pinch at its top and splay out towards the concrete piers. It's impossible to notice this in elevation; the bridge just seems the same width for the whole span. But catch it on an oblique view and you can see the splayed arch that captures lateral loads on the bridge and transfers them to the support piers. The best view of the bridge seemed to me to be from the top of the Teleférico de Gaia, or cable car, which connects the pedestrian areas of Vila Nova de Gaia to the top of the south side of the Bridge.

It's also a bit of an engineering marvel. When construction was completed in 1886, it was the largest clear span iron bridge in the world at nearly 1,300 feet across. It is a treat that this bridge is so accessible during a visit to Porto and Vila Nova de Gaia. It takes literally no extra effort to visit and interact with the bridge, which has become one of the most recognizable symbols of Porto.

View of the Dom Luís I Bridge from the debarkation point of the Teleférico de Gaia.

The engineer of the Dom Luís was Théophile Seyrig, a German engineer who was all of 38 years old at the start of construction of the Bridge. I am pretty confident you've likely never heard of Seyrig. I hadn't. Not that I'm some authority on bridge designers or anything. But I have heard of his mentor and former partner, Gustave Eiffel, who has a tower of some sort in Paris named after him.

Eiffel actually submitted a design for the Dom Luís but lost the competition to Seyrig. But Eiffel also has a bridge that spans the Douro also and it looks remarkably like the Dom Luís. Only better. His bridge is the Maria Pia Bridge.

First sighting of Gustave Eiffel's Maria Pia Bridge.

Like the Dom Luís, the Maria Pia is an iron arch with vertical iron trusses extending upwards from the arch to support the deck above. When it was built, the Maria Pia was the largest clear span iron bridge in the world at 525 feet. Or in other words, both bridges have pretty much an identical form and both pushed the limits of clear span engineering when they were built. And, like Seyrig, Eiffel was relatively young when he designed the bridge, just 43 years old. It's not really a coincidence, right?

Eiffel's commission for the Maria Pia Bridge was the result of a competition run by the Portuguese Railway Company in 1875 (it was constructed from January 1876 to October 1877). The central engineering challenge of the competition was to span a river which had never before been crossed by a bridge and which was known to be completely unsuitable for bearing on the bottom of the river. Eiffel proposed a cantilever construction method to construct the bridge from either side of the river and have the two sides meet in the middle.

Now at the time of the competition, nobody really knew who Eiffel was. There was no body of work to support his construction idea or his price tag, which was a third less than any other entry into the competition. The Railway accepted his proposal, but they ran a good background check first, and kept a close eye on him during the design and construction. It's ironic considering what would come later but every engineer starts out with no experience, right?

The Maria Pia Bridge, seen beyond the adjacent São João Bridge.

Unlike the Dom Luís Bridge, the Maria Pia is not in the middle of Porto. It was built for rail trafffic only and there's no really good reason why anyone would run a freight railway through the center of a city. It's a good ways up the Douro River either on foot or by boarding one of those boat tours that spend all day every day chugging up and down the River to show the tourists each of Porto's famous bridges up close and personal-like. I'm not panning these tours. We boarded a boat in the early morning of our only full day in the city and saw Eiffel's bridge just that way. Although we also saw it on the drive into the city.

We didn't spend a lot of time in Porto. Just about a day and half over two nights. Because our time was limited, my wish list had to also be limited. And it was: at least one Port cellar and laying eyes on the Maria Pia Bridge. Not the Maria Pia and the Dom Luís. Just the Maria Pia. Eiffel's bridge is better. And yes, I know I already wrote that.

It's all about the arch. Or more precisely, the support of the arch.

Both these bridges are arches which support a top horizontal truss on a series of vertical trusses. In the case of Seyrig's bridge, those trusses also run to the bottom deck hung from the arch. But whereas Seyrig's arch is thinnest at the center span and highest point and thickest at the supports on either side of the River, Eiffel's is not. His arch is thickest at the top and center and tapers to a point at the two sides where it connects to solid ground.

Seyrig's arch terminates at a buttress. Eiffel's ends in a point or pin connection. The overall effect of the Dom Luís is one of solidity. The overall effect of the Maria Pia is lightness. And it all comes down to the supports.

The support of the Maria Pia at the north side of the Douro. 

It's this lightness (the pin connection does not transfer moment to the supports on the banks of the river) that makes Eiffel's bridge more pleasing to my eyes and why it, and it alone among the six bridges spanning the Douro, was one of the two reasons I wanted to visit Porto. Quite frankly, I find Eiffel's bridge almost in defiance of gravity and absolutely breathtaking. It is for sure well worth the visit to Porto and a quick boat trip down the River, as ephemeral as that experience turned out to be.

I've been to Paris three times and have laid eyes on the Eiffel Tower in that city on all three trips and find the Tower to be overly heavy and a little clunky. I didn't get that from the Maria Pia. I have not sought out many of Eiffel's works (the structure supporting the Statue of Liberty doesn't count) but I might based on this experience. This bridge truly is remarkable, even if it is difficult to get to. Definite top five bridge ever for me (and I'm honestly not sure what the other four would be so I'm guessing a little bit here). Go to Porto. Eat sardines in a riverside cafe. Drink some Port. And go see these bridges. But especially Eiffel's.

The Dom Luís looking south towards Vila Nova de Gaia.

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How We Did It

It is super easy to see and cross the Dom Luís I Bridge. It is pretty much one of the central focuses (or foci, I guess) of the pedestrian experience along the Douro River in Porto and Vila Nova de Gaia. We crossed the bridge the first three times on the sidewalks of the road on the bottom deck and then took the cable car to the upper deck on our fourth and final passage. I recommend you cross it on both decks for the full experience. The cable car stops running at 6 p.m. although if you are in line with a ticket at that time, you are guaranteed one way passage.

The Maria Pia Bridge is more difficult to get to. We took a boat operated by Tomaz do Douro, who got us there just fine. There is no bad seat on the upper deck of the boat where we sat the entire time. The bridge is no longer used for rail traffic. As best I can tell from searching on the internet (always dangerous, I know...), it appears the bridge either wasn't designed or constructed or maintained (not sure which) to accommodate rail travel at a reasonable speed long term. And yes, I get the irony of a bridge which looks super light not being able to accommodate the purpose for which it was built. It still looks incredible.

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Whites, Rubies & Tawnies

The last stop on our Portugal trip was a couple of nights in Porto in the north of the country. That wasn't a lot of time to cover an entire city. Two nights meant less than two days, so we had to be focused about what it was we prioritized in the limited amount of time we had there. I think if we had been visiting Portugal under non-global pandemic circumstances without a testing requirement to come back home, we would have added another day to the end of our trip and allowed ourselves a little more time. But, well, you know...

So. About 36 hours, which included two nights sleeping. What to do here? I narrowed it down to two must-sees: Gustave Eiffel's Maria Pia Bridge and a visit to at least one Port cellar. That was it. That was the list. Which is not to say that's all we did in Porto. We actually completed both of those two items in less than 24 hours, which allowed us some time for some more sightseeing. Like visiting more Port cellars. Hey...we were only going to be there so long. Might as well go for it. 

So first of all, Porto is amazing. Lisbon, Évora and Coimbra (the other cities we stayed overnight on our trip) have nothing on Porto. Don't get me wrong, they are all incredible in their own right. But seriously, they have nothing on Porto.

Like Lisbon and Coimbra, Porto is built on a series of hills. Lisbon's are up and down all over the city reaching their height at the Castelo de São Jorge. Coimbra is built on a single hill which is a little steeper than Lisbon and topped by the city's famous University. Porto's hills rise straight up from the north bank of the Douro River and are covered with a multitude of vibrantly colored houses, shops, warehouses and all other manner of building clinging to the steep slope. The view of all that in the daytime and at night and the way that water's edge is activated by dockside cafes at the bottom of the hill and the boats cruising along and across the River is just awesome. It's like a stage set it's so perfect.

Running up and down the hills of Porto are small streets and tiny alleys all either with some significant slope or massive sets of steps connecting the water with the city proper. Every so often you come across some small plaza or square (not always on level ground) which provides a spot for rest or a view of whatever there is to see in Porto. Walk down. Take the funicular or the cable car or some other way of getting back up.

There's one more significant difference between Lisbon and Porto. When you get to the Tagus River in Lisbon, there is nothing but water. The River at that point of the city is massive and it doesn't matter what's on the other side because you can't really see it. Not so in Porto. Take a water taxi or walk across the bridge and you will quickly get to what you can see from the north side of the Douro when you look south: Vila Nova de Gaia, filled with cafes much like those on the north bank and home to all of the area's Port cellars, built for storing and shipping their product centuries ago to the rest of the world and still here today in the 21st century. Let's go!!!

The view across the Duoro to Vila Nova de Gaia.

OK, so what is Port and what is a Port cellar? 

Let's start with the Port: at the most basic of levels, Port is a fortified wine, meaning a wine with a boosted alcohol content (most wines have alcohol contents between 10 and 14 percent; Port has an alcohol content of about 20 percent). It gets that way through the addition of a distilled spirit or brandy to the fermenting wine, which also stops the fermentation process before all the sugars in the wine have been converted to alcohol. This process not only makes the wine more boozy, it also makes it sweeter because the natural sugars stay in the wine. The earlier the fermentation stoppage, the sweeter the wine.

There are many, many fortified wines in this world. Not all of them are called Port. That's because Port is an appellation (like Champagne or Prosecco) which can only be used to name wines from the Douro Valley. The Douro Valley is located about 120 kilometers east of Porto and stretches for about another 100 kilometers all the way to the Spanish border. The Valley has a unique microclimate caused by sheltering mountains which our guide at the Burmester cellar described as "nine months of winter and three months of hell". The soil, which is rockier than most soils I've ever seen (they had a sample of the soil at the Cálem cellar) is the great equalizer, retaining the heat of the day at night in summer and regulating the water supply for the vines. The grapes are grown on terraces, sort of like the Incas used to grow their crops centuries ago, which I've also never seen in the viniculture industry. 

That covers the Port, at least for a couple of paragraphs anyway.

The wine, after it is harvested in the fall and crushed by machines and feet (machines only crushes too many seeds and seed taste is not good in wine), remains in the Douro Valley over the winter and is then moved to Vila Nova de Gaia on the south side of the River from Porto. The wine was traditionally moved downstream on custom built Rabelo boats (there's a photograph of one above) which are now on prominent display near the south bank of the Duoro River. Today, trucks move it faster.

Once the wine is moved, is is cellared, meaning it is held and aged in either vats or barrels or both, depending on the type of Port. Everyone does it this way. ALL of the Port producers are at Vila Nova de Gaia. The skyline at night is a neon (or more likely LED at this point) who's who of Port houses. It's really pretty cool. It also emphasizes the value to the economy of the region.

Vats and barrels. The "223" on the barrel is the quantity of the barrel in liters.

Got all that? Good! Now it gets really complicated. I hope I get this part right.

Generally speaking, there are three different varieties of Port: White Port, Ruby Port and Tawny Port (there are actually four - rosé is produced by some sellers but none of the cellars we visited offered this option so I'm sort of skipping it here). In addition to the three main varieties, there are other terms to know, namely Vintage, late bottle vintage (or LBV) and colheita.

Whites are probably the simplest to deal with so let's start there. Whites are produced with white grapes and are aged after fermentation in either stainless steel or concrete tanks or in barrels, but never vats. Whites aged in stainless or concrete will develop flavors based on the grapes alone and will retain a clear, light color. Aging in barrels will add extra flavor notes from contact with the wood, but they will also darken over time. Some White Ports are aged in barrels for decades. Others are bottled after just a couple of years in a tank. White Ports make up about 10% of the total Port output, so not a significant focus of the industry.

During aging, Port will be exposed to oxygen to varying degrees depending the aging method. Barrel aged wines will be undergo a lot of oxidation whereas those wines in vats or bottled young will be exposed to less oxidation. The more oxidation during aging, the longer the wine will typically last after opening the bottle. I'll come back to this.

Port at Burmester: White, Ruby (LBV) and Tawny 10 year.

Let's do ruby next because on the White-Ruby-Tawny spectrum rubies are the second most sought after Ports (although there are HUGE exceptions to this). Ruby Port is made with red grapes, hence the name. It is produced with the natural fruit flavors of the red grapes in mind and is therefore only aged in vats to allow the least amount of oxidation possible (oxidation causes wines to last longer after opening but it also deteriorates the natural flavors of the grapes). Rubies are younger wines when they are bottled. Both of the two major producer cellars we visited use up to six year old wines for their ruby Ports.

Finally (but not really...) we get to the Tawny Ports. Buy a bottle of Tawny Port and it generally comes with an age on the label, usually 10 year, 20 year, 30 year or 40 (!!!!) year, which indicates the approximate age of the blend (most but not all Tawnies are blends of different vintages) in the bottle. And by age, I mean time in the barrel. Tawnies get a ton of their character from the time they spend in the barrel. They will start out with the natural fruits and add to that spices, dried fruits and other notes from the wood. More time equals more money. We tasted a couple of 10 year Tawnies in our time in Portugal. We did not get anything older than that.

So...Whites, Rubies and Tawnies in that order, right? Least complex to most complex? Youngest to oldest. Least expensive to most expensive, right? Umm...no.

Every so often there is a harvest where the growing conditions are so perfect or so close to perfect that the grapes produce a wine of extraordinary character. When that happens (which is about three years out of every ten, if you must know), the producer may elect to declare that year a Vintage (I'm going to use a capital V for this without really understanding if that's required). These are the absolute best Ports produced. They are bottled young after two years, only from that year and only from vats. They are also bottled so that they continue to age, meaning you really aren't going out and grabbing a bottle of Vintage right after it's bottled and drinking it. It needs time in the bottle. Vintages are technically Rubies, but they are the most expensive Ports out there.

Whites, Rubies, Tawnies, Vintages, LBVs, colheitas...talking the whole thing through at Burmester.

Can't wait for (or afford) a Vintage? Then maybe you pick up a Late Bottle Vintage (hereafter just referred to as LBV). LBVs are also a premium product for their age, made from the same outstanding year as Vintages but aged in a barrel. So they are a bit of a cross between rubies and tawnies but they are all younger (six years before bottling) than the youngest tawny. They get a single year on the bottle just like a Vintage but their quality is dulled a little by barrel aging. 

Why don't Port producers just save all their best year wine for Vintages? Well, maybe cash in hand (LBVs can sell younger) and market saturation (fewer Vintage bottles means they are more expensive) have something to do with it.

Finally, let's talk colheitas, which are really Tawnies (meaning lots of time in the barrel) but from a single year, rather than a typical tawny which is a blend of several years. The goal behind a 10, 20, 30 or 40 year Tawny (which are all blends) is to produce a wine of uniform character for each decade. Colheitas being from a single year's harvest will produce a wine of singular character which might vary from year to year.

That's what I learned about Port in Vila Nova de Gaia supplemented by a few hours of online research. And all that's well and good, but there's still an experiential side to this whole thing that's the reason why we travel.

The alley approach to Augusto's, a super small Port producer in Vila Nova de Gaia.

We managed to visit three Port cellars in our 36 hours or so in Porto: Burmester, Cálem and Augusto's. The first two have been in business a long, long time (Burmester since 1750 and Cálem since 1859). Augusto's...not so much. Try 2014. So two old masters (I mean they must be doing something right to be in business 150+ and 270+ years...) and a really, really (by Port standards) fledgling operation.

While we didn't know it before we visited Burmester and Cálem, they are actually now both owned by the same parent company, Sogevinus Fine Wines. We picked those two based on available on line booking times and by just walking in the door and asking if there were tastings available. Turns out like a lot of other breweries, distillers and wineries in the world, there is a very, very corporate side to the Port business. The contrast with Augusto's (which was picked for us by our tour company, G Adventures) was striking. And honestly, if I had known we were visiting two cellars owned by the same parent company, I probably would have worked a little harder at finding an alternative.

I know all that sounds like we didn't get all we could have out of Burmester and Cálem. Nothing could be further from the truth. I thought the visits to both were excellent. Both were full museum-type experiences, with video displays and projections in addition to in person narration as our tour groups walked by vats and barrels containing the actual product that made Porto famous. You didn't get much of that at Augusto's. You get a lot of talking while passing barrels and bottles of their Port.

The wow or shock-and-awe factor or whatever else you want to call it definitely tilted the front parts of our Port cellar visits towards Bermester and Cálem as being more enjoyable and informative. Learning is better sometimes with displays and animations. It just is. Plus the opportunity to stand next to the enormous vats in both places was appreciated. These things are absolutely massive. One single vat holds 74,000 bottles of wine. I've never seen an aging tank for any sort of liquid this big, I don't think.

In the end, I think Burmester was the best experience and it's all about location, location, location. The front door of the cellar is pretty much right at the south side of the Dom Luís I Bridge and there are spectacular views of the gorgeous bridge that is so important to Porto and Vila Nova de Gaia both from their waiting room and their terrace right alongside the Duoro. I would have loved to have had our Port tasting on that terrace. Unfortunately, that's not what happens on the tour we booked.

The Dom Luís I Bridge, as seen from Burmester's waiting room.

Speaking of tasting, I did.

First of all, let me say that I fully expected to not love Port. Maybe not even like Port. Since I'd never really had a dessert wine, that's a pretty closed-minded thing to think, but considering I am not a fan of sweet wines (but I do love the odd sweet stout or porter now and then), I expected that Port would be a hard pass for me. OK, maybe soft pass.

At both Burmester and Cálem, there were a variety of tasting options. Some of these different tasting options followed the very same tour of the cellars. Same tour, different glasses when you sat down. Not so at Porto Augusto's. Just one option there, although there were options within the tasting for two of the three glasses (essentially they poured a choice of two wines for each of the first two tastings and one wine for the third, meaning you couldn't taste all five wines unless you shared or had some no shows; we did both).

I prefer to taste wine with food. It's odd because I generally prefer to drink wine at home without food. But since I don't really know much about pairing wine with food, I'm always up for a little education from someone who knows way better than me about this stuff. Plus it gives me something else to do rather than just downing wine. Because the option was offered at both Burmester and Cálem, I opted to do the tasting with food. And in both cases, the food was chocolate.

Port at Cálem: White, colheita (Tawny) and Tawny 10 year. More chocolate at Cálem.

I know pretty well what I drank at both Burmester and Cálem because I took photographs of the bottles neatly lined up behind our tasting glasses. Both offered a White and a Tawny 10 year. Burmester went with an LBV and Cálem went with a colheita as the third offering between the White and the Tawny. I am less sure about what we sampled at Augusto's because each was poured from a bottle in front of us and then the bottle was taken away but here's what I wrote down: a choice between a six year Tawny or White followed by a reserve eight year Tawny or White followed by a 2013 LBV. And yes, I know those terms and ages don't match what I wrote earlier in this post. But that's what I wrote down.

Of the Whites, Cálem's tasted just like a standard dry white wine and Augusto's offerings were darker and decidedly more brandy-like. Burmester's hit a sweet spot in the middle. I'd drink Augusto's and Burmester's again (especially at Burmester's €7.50 price tag!!!). I'd pass on Cálem's White & Dry. I actually didn't finish it.

On the chocolate side of things, Burmester directed us to eat dark chocolate with the Ruby and milk chocolate with the Tawny. Cálem gave no such directions. Yes, we didn't have a Ruby at Cálem, but they did give us both milk and dark chocolate. Regardless of the direction we received, here's the thing with chocolate and Port: it's incredible. The sugar in the chocolate works extremely well with the natural sweetness of the wine and brings out those many flavors, especially the fruit flavors. Remember earlier when I wrote I expected not to love Port. I was wrong. I do love Port and bring me the chocolates when you break open the bottle. 

Overall, I appreciated the Burmester Tawny 10 Year the most. Maybe it's a first love kind of thing but that was the one that drew me in and got me. There may have been a stop at the duty free on the way home because it didn't appear we'd be able to get any back home. That's two consecutive Europe trips with duty free stops on the way home after zero in my entire life before that.

Cálem's cellar, with a cable car in the background. And a view of Sandeman from the cable car.

A few final notes on Port.

First, I really did appreciate our visit to Porto Augusto's but as a novice or virgin Port taster, I needed something more than just a few glasses of wine dropped in front of me. I wanted some context. I wanted displays. I wanted large vats. I'm not ready for nuances yet and I think that's what Augusto's was all about. I enjoyed it; I just didn't get as much out of it. The white was the most impressive of the whites we tasted. 

I especially wanted to love Augusto's because they are 100% Portuguese owned and that's rare for a Port house. Burmester was founded by an Englishman and a German and are now owned by a Spanish conglomerate. A number of the older Port houses were founded by the English in some way. When war was declared with France (and when was England NOT at war with France?) and the import of French wines was banned, the English nobility turned to allied Portugal and Porto for their booze lifeline.

Second, those vats that I love? They are custom built on site. They are too big to fit practically through any manmade opening and too unwieldy to really transport anywhere. We were told at Burmester that it required eight people to build a vat and it took those eight all of 14 days. The upside is they last for more than 100 years. How cool is it to invest that much effort in something to have your labors last that long? I think that's pretty impressive.

Finally, Vila Nova de Gaia has had a tendency to flood. A lot. Every cellar we visited that had been around more than 20 years or so (we actually stopped into Sandeman to check tour times in addition to visiting Burmester and Cálem) made note of this fact. Some of these floods were pretty minor, maybe a foot or two above the cellar floor (not that I really want any part of any building flooding) but some were significant. The 1909 flood covered the streets of Vila Nova de Gaia with ten feet (!!!) of water.

Finally, finally, I feel like I missed something in Porto. I'm sure some of that was the short stay, but I'm also sure that with something like wine, you need some time to digest what you have learned and tasted and processed where you'd like to go (or more accurately what you'd like to taste) next. Unfortunately, I had all this sink in on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. I'm wondering if there's a significant difference between the 10, 20, 30 and 40 year Tawnies. I guess that gives me a reason to go back.

Historic floods marked on the side of the door to Sandeman.

One more thing...storing Port and how long does it last when opened. We got a pretty uniform set of instructions from all three purveyors on the storage of this stuff: store non-vintages with stoppers (as opposed to corks) vertically, like you would a bottle of liquor and store vintages and other corked Port horizontally, like you would wine. For all types, cool and dark is best as an environment.

On the "how long does it last after opening" question, though, we got a variety of answers. Augusto's seemed to give the longest times at one week (for Vintages), "months" for LBVs and two to three years for aged Tawnies (those at least 10 years old). Neither Burmester nor Cálem claimed quite this long and other online resources suggest shorter times. It seems based on some checking of various different sites that a 10+ Tawny is likely good for two to three months whereas a Vintage is lasting a week maximum before it starts losing flavor significantly (if it's an older Vintage then maybe two or three days). A filtered LBV will last 10 to 12 days and a colheita will last two to three weeks, as will an unfiltered LBV or a White. That's about as good as I can get; looks like I need to finish that Tawny I brought back in less than two months after it gets opened, whenever that might be. 

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How We Did It

We visited three Port cellars in Vila Nova de Gaia. One of the three (Porto Augusto's) was reserved in advance for us but the process seems pretty simple from their website: pay half when you book online and pay the other half when you get there.

The other two we found on our own. I will say from my (admittedly very limited) experience trying to book Port cellar tours online that it's confusing at best. Some cellars have pretty clear reservation systems (Sandeman stands out here) while others were very difficult for me to figure out. We booked our tour at Burmester online, although when we completed the reservation, we found out we really had just sent an email inquiring about availability which would need to be confirmed with a return email (which came quickly). For someone who knew nothing about Port, I think Burmester's was about ideal. Go with the chocolate! And the location of their cellar is about as perfect as you could wish for.

We also did some walking-in-and-asking at both Sandeman and Cálem. Both places had spots on the day we walked in just after lunch-ish. Sandeman's time didn't work for us; Cálem's did and that's how we ended up there. I think Cálem would be great for the uninitiated just like Burmester, although ultimately I thought Burmester's Port was better. They have been in business 91 years longer after all...

Both Burmester and Cálem served us Arcadia Chocolates, a producer based in Porto which was founded in 1933. I appreciated this local touch. This is good chocolate. We saw it in the Porto available for purchase in the Porto airport on the way out of town.

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The Aqueduct

Over the I don't know how many centuries of millennia that man has been building things, we have, as a species, managed to pull off some amazing feats. Whether it's a simple hut for shelter or 2,000 foot plus tall skyscrapers or packed dirt roads or cable-stayed bridges, at some point (and I'm sure someone will prove me wrong very soon here), we've covered pretty much any kind of structure you could possibly conceive of on, above or below the surface of this planet that we live on.

One of the most important things man has ever built which operates on the most simple principle but that was a huge effort to build was the aqueduct. Now, I know we have underground aqueducts even today. I'm not talking about those. I'm talking about the ones that I always think of when someone says aqueduct. You know, the long, linear stone things consisting of arch after arch after arch stretching across miles and miles of countryside. Think Romans, even though they were not the first to come up with such a notion.

Think about it. These things were built with the express purpose of bringing water to somewhere that had a lot of water to somewhere that humans lived that didn't have enough water. That's all they did. But water is essential for life. It's pretty much as important as things on the importance scale get in this world. 

The engineering of getting the water from points A to B was pretty simple. You just sloped the top of the aqueduct down. It's just gravity. But over a long distance, that's not so simple. You typically have to start with a pretty tall structure so that the top can slope down over miles and miles, even when the terrain slopes up. These things were engineering marvels. Essential, simple and complicated.

I don't think I've spent a lot of time in my life checking out aqueducts. That's not for a lack of desire. The Pont du Gard in southern France has to be on my non-bucket-list bucket list. I'm sure there are others out there as well. But in all the places I've traveled, I just don't think there's been anywhere that I've been that has had a notable aqueduct of any kind of size or scale. I remember a single arch of a ruin in Barcelona but other than that, I can't remember any.

And then we went to Portugal, where we saw three. Now admittedly, one (in Lisbon) was from the window seat of our inbound flight and another (in Coimbra) was from from the back seat of a taxi while we were searching for a COVID test to allow us to come back home. But we also spent a couple of days in the city of Évora in Portugal's Alentejo Region and managed to get up close and personal with one of these things. The opportunity could not be passed up.

Évora's aqueduct, just inside the northern wall of the city.

Évora is an old place. Recorded history of human settlement there goes all the way back to the Celts and the second century B.C., although there are prehistoric cave paintings and at least one odd stone circle that suggest that man has been around the site where Évora sits for much longer than any written record suggests. Over the last two millennia, the city has been occupied, built and modified by the Romans, the Visigoths, the Moors and now the Portuguese. In the Middle Ages (starting in the 15th century), Évora became the preferred place of residence for the royal family, elevating what now looks like a tiny town to second city importance in the nation.

It is actually staggering today to think that Évora would ever be a place of importance to something like a whole nation. In the 21st century, it is just an historic town in the middle of nowhere. There's no obvious mode of travel there other than whatever you drive on a road or other paved surface and it is surrounded by acres upon acres of farmland. It's gorgeous but it's also barren and not obviously important. But it was. Something about trade routes if I'm remembering right.

When the Romans occupied Évora, they built an aqueduct stretching about 11 miles north of the city to bring water all the way to the city's main square. I have no idea how the residents of the town had access to water before that time. Maybe it wasn't big enough to need a bona fide source and they survived on wells, although all of that is complete speculation. Anyway, for whatever reason, the Romans felt the city needed one, so they built one. The Romans had a tendency to do that.

The Praça do Giraldo, Évora. 

The aqueduct the Romans built is not the one standing in Évora today. In the early 1500s, the entire length of the aqueduct was re-built according to the designs of Francisco de Arruda, who happened to be the royal architect (I'm sure that was quite the gig) at the time. Francisco de Arruda made a pretty big impact on Portuguese built history. We visited his Tower de Belém earlier in the week before we made our way to Évora. I'm sure there are more than two of his works still standing but if it somehow were just two after almost 500 years, that ain't too shabby.

The new aqueduct took about six years to complete from 1531 or so to 1537 and was named the Água de Prata Aqueduct, or (translated into English) the Aqueduct of Silver Water. It started in the same spot as the Roman aqueduct and ended at the fountain in the Praça de Giraldo, also matching the Roman version's end point. Inside the city walls, it served a series of fountains that allowed citizens of Évora to gather fresh water.

The aqueduct today doesn't provide the city of Évora with fresh water. I guess they figured out a better way to do that over last almost 500 years. I'm not surprised at all by that fact. But I was surprised to learn that the aqueduct did provide Évora with water until 1979 and that the structure still supplies water to farms outside the city wall today. I'm shocked any place is using a water system with this kind of aqueduct for anything in 2021. It's actually kind of cool.

Today, there is a path alongside the aqueduct that stretches a little more than five miles outside the north wall of the city. Considering the limited time we had in Évora and the fact that if we walked out any sort of distance, we'd have to walk the same distance back, we decided not to do that. Instead, we took a walk outside the north wall of the city and then traced what is left of the aqueduct from the north wall all the way to the city's main square. It's not a continuous path so following the aqueduct is a bit of a treasure hunt. Quite simply, it's just gone in certain spots.

The aqueduct along the Rua do Cano. Why build your own outside wall when there's an arch already there?

The longest continuous stretch of the Água de Prata aqueduct by far is just inside the north city wall along the east side of the Rua do Cano. You can't miss it as you walk east from the Porta da Lagoa. It's an enormous arched structure that dominates the street view. It is so impressive to stand near to those tall arches that have been standing for about 500 years. Think about how impressive the construction must have been back then. Or even more impressive...in Roman times some 1,500 years before that. 

We took a guided tour of Évora after our walking self-guided tracing of the aqueduct. Our guide on that tour told us the Roman version of the aqueduct was three times as high as the one there now. While I'm not doubting the expertise of our guide, that seems pretty implausible and pretty well unnecessary. I mean there's no need to improve the performance of a working aqueduct and the one at its current height seems to have done the job well enough for four plus centuries.

Rua do Cano, like so many other streets in Portugal everywhere, slopes up. Évora, like most towns and cities built a long time ago, was built on a hill for defensive purposes (I'm guessing there a little bit). Thus, the very tall aqueduct. Can't feed the tallest spot in the city by gravity without starting at a significant elevation. 

As tall as the aqueduct is at the north end of Rua do Cano, by the time you get not very far along the street, you'll find that you can stand on your toes and reach the top of the aqueduct pretty easily. Towards the north end of the Rua, the locals have taken full advantage of the fact that there is an intermittent sturdy stone wall in place by building the exterior walls of their houses and shops in between the supports of each arch. Hey, if there's something there already, may as well save some time and money by making the aqueduct a part of your own outside wall.

Best shot I could get of the top of the aqueduct. At the top of Rua do Cano.

As you walk south down the Rua do Cano, You might lose the aqueduct as it disappears into the hill and the buildings built around it. Keep going and keep checking the streets on your right to pick it up again. If you hit the Rua de Avis, you've gone too far. If you care about completeness in sequence, go back. Otherwise walk right down the Rua de Avis and you'll find it pretty easily.

At the bottom of the Rua de Avis, there is a well-preserved, freestanding part of the aqueduct that makes a hard right and then a hard left. It's the best corner of the aqueduct in the city and it's kind of cool to see how de Arruda handled the corner. You are closer to the end of the aqueduct at this point than you are to the city wall. You'll lost sight of the arches as you head south into the Praça de Sertório but take the alley on the left of the Praça and you'll find it again easily enough.

Down the alley, it is worth a stop at the top of the Rua Nova to take note of a couple of things around you. At the west side of the intersection, there is a stone structure with a series of slim, Tuscan columns. The structure was a water-storing reservoir (might be a bit redundant there) with the remains of a fountain on its front. This was one of the publicly accessible spots for citizens of Évora to gather water.

It is also the most renaissance-y part of the aqueduct. You can mistake the rest of it easily for a Roman structure. Except at this point. This is all 16th century.

Bottom of the Rua de Avis and top of the Rua Nova.

Speaking of the Romans, at this very same point in the city, there is a portion of the old Roman city wall. It's on the south side of Rua Nova at this intersection and it's standing next to a piece of wall built during the 16th century. I've added a picture of that wall below.

If there were ever any doubt about the Romans' superiority in building walls, buildings and pretty much anything else they touched, just look at the picture below. The right hand side of the photograph is the Roman wall, about 2,000 years old. The left side of the picture is a much newer wall. Say about 500 years old. The Roman wall is built of ashlar masonry carefully quarried and shaped with relatively uniform mortar joints both horizontally and vertically between the stone blocks. The other side...maybe not so much. There's very little sense of regularity whatsoever and pieces of stone are jammed in wherever they are needed to make the wall look like a whole wall.

There are times in my travels that I come across Roman walls or buildings or roads that I wonder how we could have lost the science and technology and skill that the Romans brought to building. I guess we did go through a period of time in Europe known as the Dark Ages, but still...it's amazing how we forgot. The Romans were good at building. I mean, not quite the Incas, but pretty darned good all the same. 

Walking down Rua Nova. Take a left at the bottom and you are in the Praça do Giraldo.

From the Roman wall, it's a quick walk down Rua Nova; past the dispensary on the right with its doorway inside another of the aqueduct's arches; and left at the bottom of the hill and you get to the center of the town, the Praça do Giraldo. 

In times way before the 21st century and with both versions of the aqueduct, the show would stop here. The main plaza of the city was the end point of the silver water. If you were lucky enough to have a reservoir or fountain near your home on the 1500s version of the aqueduct, you could get water close to your home. Otherwise the main city square was it.

Just like the path of that water all those years ago, our journey following the Água de Prata aqueduct stopped at the Plaça do Giraldo also. I loved taking less than an hour in our day in Évora and doing this walk. It was not only fascinating and fun to follow the aqueduct itself, but it also took us past a whole host of interesting views and spots. It's not just walking alongside a work of engineering, it's exploring the history of the city itself. 

I've tried in this post to concentrate on the path and structure of the aqueduct itself and not get to get distracted by other things along the way. But there is one more spot that I think is worth mentioning as a stop along the length of the journey. Between the bottom of the Rua de Avis and the top of the Rua Nova, there is a small fenced in opening with some sort of temple ruin behind it. I'm assuming it's Roman but I have not been able to find the name of the place online. I guess I should have asked the guide who took us on a tour of the city but I just plain forgot.

This is not the first time we've been to a city and latched onto a tour of ruins as a marker of the past on one of our travels. We did something similar in Barcelona with the city wall in 2014 and there's a link to that story earlier in this post just after the second picture. This one was different. It got us to parts of Évora that we likely wouldn't have visited any other way. Without the aqueduct, we probably would have just visited the Roman temple, the Cathedral and the public gardens. We did those anyway (and so should you if you are in Évora). The aqueduct was a great complement to those more popular tourist sights. 

Now...onto the Pont du Gard. Sometime.

Ruin of a Roman temple? Need some help on this one.

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How We Did It

As soon as I knew that Évora had a centuries old aqueduct ruin running through the town I was determined to trace its entire path from the city wall to the main square.

The difficulty I found was that there was no real good online resource showing how to do it. I found a couple of blog posts and some travel sites describing the Água de Prata but no maps or turn-by-turn directions. I was actually concerned that we would not be able to do it, although having now been to Évora I'm convinced I could have walked every street in the place in the time we spent there. But let's face it, that would have taken a long time.

Fortunately, our hotel in Évora (the Vitoria Stone Hotel, if you must know) had an excellent map of the city showing the exact route of the aqueduct. I found the map to be perfect for what we were looking to do so I'm posting it below. We maybe had to backtrack once or twice (there are not enough street names to do it right the first time) but we did the whole thing from outside the city wall to the Praça do Giraldo in about 45 minutes. Get some chestnuts or some cork souvenirs or a pastry somewhere after that. You deserve all three.

Enough said about all that. Follow the map. The aqueduct is at number 11 and stretches to the north and south.

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