Porto, Portugal

I had 2 days in Porto before beginning the Portuguese Coastal Camino. Besides sightseeing, there were 2 things I needed to do: get my Pilgrim “passport” for the Camino at the Catedral do Porto and figure out my bus route out to the coastal edge of the city to start my walk.

There wasn’t really a line at the Cathedral, so that task was done quickly. I stopped into the bus station within Sao Bento train station, and stood in line quite a while. I think a lot of new university students were getting their bus passes. The woman at the desk began to pull her shade down to indicate her lunch break just as I stepped up to the window. She was happy to sell me the ticket with a few rides on before she pulled the shade all the way down!

Even there there’s major construction going on in and around Sao Bento station, the tiles inside made the trip worthwhile.

Since I was near, I went to visit a church with more amazing tile on the outside wall.

The narrow house truly is super narrow with 1 or 2 rooms on each of its 3 floors. And on one of the floors, there’s a doorway that allows visitors to touch the back foot on a statue of Christ stumbling while carrying the cross. The Carmo church had stairs down into catacombs where I could see human bones in a glass floor (eek!), stand on a balcony to see the whole church, and get a glimpse of various tools people used flagellation.

There’s so much beauty to be seen around every corner and up every hill in Porto, much like Lisbon.

One last touristy thing I did was to get a ticket to visit the Livraria Lello, one of the oldest bookstores in Europe (Lisbon has one too) and supposedly one of the most beautiful. I have since read that they charge for entry tickets to help them survive as a bookstore. It is quite beautiful outside and in.

Porto is a beautiful city, for sure, and one I’d like to return to explore more of. It was also quite cool to get off a city bus in its coastal edge and start walking north!