This month's World Heritage Site

Porto, Portugal
The home city of port wine is one of Europe’s great underrated destinations

Now that the Oxford Dictionary has added Homer Simpson’s “Doh!” to its lexicon, it’s becoming more common to hear travelers say exactly that – Doh! – when they finally encounter Portugal.

Europe’s westernmost nation, well off the continent’s beaten paths and long beyond its starring role on the world stage, has quietly spent the past 30 years emerging from its somnolent and dictatorial past. Along the way, learning from its European neighbors, the country has pulled off the difficult feat of modernizing itself without losing the qualities that are attracting all those Dohs.

Thus, the “new” Portugal has laid in a superb modern infrastructure of telecommunications, accommodations and transportation – you can whisk north from the capital of Lisbon deep into the countryside along sleek highways or use your wireless devices in most of the country without worries about making a good connection.

But Portugal hasn’t committed itself to a complete makeover. While the country’s hard wiring is modern and efficient, it winds its way through centuries-old buildings and along narrow city streets and rustic country lanes. Like the Italians, the Portuguese are good at rebuilding the insides of old things – a custom that in the long run brings more satisfaction, much as renovating the kitchen does more for one’s quality of life than simply reshingling the house.

Where Portugal shines in its loving regard for its old self is the city of Porto, near the mouth of the Douro River in the country’s far north. There the Douro carved steep banks before its entry into the Atlantic, and starting around 800 B.C., settlers found it to be a compatible place for a sheltered, defensible, accessible trading post. 

In Roman times, the settlement was called Cale, and later, in reference to its function as a port, Portucale – the origin of the country’s name. As the former Roman province of Lusitania evolved into modern Portugal, and Latin into Portuguese, the city became known simply as Oporto (“the port”) in recognition of its ancient function.

Until the 17^th century, Porto was insignificant compared to the capital of Lisbon, 200 miles south. It was then that the British negotiated a trade agreement with Portugal that virtually guaranteed Porto’s emergence as the country’s second city.

What had happened was that the French had so dramatically increased the price of the Bordeaux wines they were shipping to Britain that King Charles II imposed a ban on clarets, an edict that sent British traders scrambling for a new source of robust wines that could travel well overseas.

They quickly hit upon the Douro Valley and its fortified wines, which the smitten British quickly came to call simply “Port.” It wasn’t just a matter of the British settling on port in a pinch – port’s sweet, high-alcoholic richness made it the perfect sipping wine for post-dinner gatherings where men would spend hours next to a warm fire bantering and discussing the news of the day.

By the end of the 17^th century, Porto was Portugal’s second largest city and port, a position it has not ceded since. Wealth from the wine trade with Britain established the city as Portugal’s major industrial center, too. Today the city is a hub of publishing, textile and chemical manufacturing and food processing.

Over a four-century span, Porto’s growing commercial power created a central city that reflected the increasing wealth, taste and power of Portugal’s merchant class. The ensemble of municipal, office and residential buildings, which has remained remarkably intact, was declared a World Heritage Site in 1996.

— Patrick Totty