Porto, Portugal

After boarding our ship, Silversea Silver Dawn yesterday, May 2, we sailed for our first stop, Porto, Portugal.

The seas were a little rough over night, but we were still tired from our travel and then day in Lisbon we were both able to sleep well. We did have one adventure on the first night aboard. We had brought a heating pad because of our elderly bodies needing one on occasion. I accidentally used the wrong connection to plug it into the wall and that resulted in sparks and blowing out half the lights in our cabin. The heating pad was toast and the ship’s engineer was able to restore our lights. We had done something similar many years ago in Sydney, I guess some mistakes happen again.

The port for Porto is Leixoes and is about 45 minutes away from the city center. It is the largest harbor in Northern Portugal. The main industry in this area is fishing and tourism. The Portuguese eat a lot of fish, being the largest fish consuming country at 60 kilos per person annually. Most people around the world consume only about 20 kilos per capita. The fish that the Portuguese mostly consume is codfish, but it is not fished locally, but is imported from Norway.

The Porto area is the only area in Portugal that does not produce wine. It is famous for port wine, but that is made elsewhere and is aged in Porto. There is a whole elaborate network of credentials that have to be adhered to for wine to be declared as Port.

Our excursion has us touring the Stock Exchange Palace, which is now used for city offices. It was built from 1842 to 1909. The building is very elaborate.

We next went to Saint Francis Church. It was built on the ruins of a convent. Apparently Saint Francis has 3 different orders. One is for priests, one for nuns and one for lay people who want to do charitable work. The church we went to was for the 3rd order.

We next walked down to the Douro River and we had some time to walk around and then we had a snack stop with a glass of Port wine and one of the yummy Pastel de Nata cakes.

Our last stop of the day was at Saint Benedict Train Station. The interior is covered with more of the beautiful blue and while tiles. These actually are murals and very interesting to see.

One fact that our guide was very much intent in telling us was that Napoleon tried to invade Portugal 3 times but failed because of the long alliance Portugal had with the United Kingdom.

The weather was mostly cloudy, and we did get intermittent showers.

We had very rough seas when we sailed and the prediction of a rainy day the next day.