Porto

7/17/18 Porto and the Douro River

7/17/18 Jardim de Carrillho Videira, Porto

Porto is a beautiful, working-class, riverside city. Even if the main purpose for my trip to Portugal had not been to attend the 9^th annual International Urban Sketchers Symposium, I would have chosen to visit Porto for many reasons. Although much of the architecture and landscape (and hilly, even steeper terrain!) are similar to Lisbon, Porto has a less intense ambiance that was more comfortable to me. Per capita, Porto apparently has more tourists than Lisbon, but I noticed that prices of restaurant food, for example, were not inflated as they were in Lisbon’s heavily touristed areas. Greg and I wandered into a café for lunch one day and saw prices of 3 to 4 Euro per entrée. Thinking that they would be small tapas-size servings (as we’d seen in Lisbon), he ordered two entrées – only to find that they were full size! Our entire three-entrée meal plus beverages came to about 12 Euro. (We found similarly low prices later in Coimbra, a college town. We paid double that in some Lisbon cafés.)

I have so many sketches and photos from my symposium experience that I’m going to cover all of that in a separate post. Shown here are the few sketches I made before the symposium began as well as a several photos to give you a general flavor for Porto.

7/1/7/18 Igreja do Carmo, Porto. As I was sketching this, blog reader @drawingvagabond recognized me! The best thing
about the USk symposium is meeting people in person whom I know otherwise only online.

7/17/18  Jardins do Palacio de Cristal

Douro River

Torre dos Clerigos at night

Symposium logo designed by Isa Silva. She said the Torre dos
Clerigos is curious to see what all the sketchers
are drawing!

Clerigos is Porto's icon. You'll see my
sketches of this lovely tower in a later post.
It was the inspiration for the symposium logo
shown at right.

Douro River at night

Whenever I travel near water, I like to fill a waterbrush or my spritzer bottle with a local natural water
source. Here's my hero filling my spritzer from the Douro River.

When we walked through the Casa Oriental Comur Conserveira shop in Lisbon, we resisted buying any of the colorful canned fish because we didn't want to pack the heavy cans. When we spotted the same store in Porto, our resistance broke down, and we bought several cans. The solution to lugging them all home? We ate them in Porto instead! Best canned fish ever. Regret that I didn't buy more to take home after all.

Smoked salmon, tuna, mackerel and sea bass (the latter was our favorite). The wine we found in our Airbnb apartment was a nice complement.