Porto

Landmarks

What I would eat first.

Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.

• Torre dos Clérigos 1,500 points

  Your compass. Lose your bearings anywhere on this level, look up, and it is there over the roofs. Granite, a great deal of it, on the highest ground the level touches. There is a stair inside if you want to stand above every lane you have eaten. I would.

• Câmara Municipal do Porto 500 points

  The northern limit of the level, and the youngest thing on it by several hundred years. It sits at the head of a long slope that the whole avenue below aims straight at. Walk down it rather than up: the entire arrangement was laid out to be looked at from the bottom. I have firm opinions about pavement.

• Mercado do Bolhão 500 points

  The one building on this level where everybody else is also thinking about food. It sits in a dip, two floors deep, galleries right the way round the upper edge, and the noise reaches the lane before you do. Two of the ways beside it are called Galeria Norte and Galeria Sul, which is as literal as a street name gets. You eat there. I eat the way in.

• Muralhas Fernandinas do Porto 500 points

  It is on Rua da Bainharia, at the foot of the Pena Ventosa hill, and you will not be looking for it. You walk past a house, and then the house turns into something four times too thick. Come at it from below, up the slope. I do not often meet anything my own size.

• Chafariz da Rua das Taipas 250 points

  Set into the wall on a steep, quiet stretch, at about shoulder height, and easy to go straight past. Taipas is rammed earth, and the lane was once lined with it, and there is nothing earthen about the thing sitting in it now. Stop anyway. A chafariz was where a whole lane came to fill a jug, and this one is a long way uphill from the river.

• Miradouro da Muralha Fernandina 250 points

  The lane under it is called Cima do Muro, on top of the wall, so the name tells you where you are before your legs do. It is a haul up from the river and there is no polite way round that. This is the one place on the level where stopping and looking out is the entire job. Go late in the day.

• Paço Episcopal do Porto 250 points

  From the Terreiro da Sé it is a flat wall of windows and it gives the square almost nothing. Go down to the quay and look back up: from there the front rears over the hill like a cliff with rows of holes in it. It saves its entire face for the people at the bottom. Rua de Dom Hugo runs along its flank, and that lane is the quietest ground on this level.

• Praça da Batalha 250 points

  The eastern end of the level, and the top of a long pull up from the water. The lane leaving it to the north is Rua de Cimo de Vila, the top of the town, which is exactly what this is. Sit on the steps a while. Everything from here runs downhill, and downhill is the best-tasting direction there is.

Why here

Somebody stood here and decided.

Height, and deliberately not the river. The main settlement went up on the morro da Pena Ventosa, the hill the cathedral sits on now, built the way hillforts were built: people wanted the high ground and a position they could hold. The river was the whole reason for the place, but the river was also the road everyone else arrived by, so the landing stayed separate and downhill. Two names on this level still carry that hill, Largo da Pena Ventosa and Rua da Pena Ventosa, and a dig on that street turned up the wall that ringed the first village.

Sources: repositorio-aberto.up.pt p. 16, www.cm-porto.pt

Who ruled

Everyone who thought they owned this.

I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.

1096–1120

The counts, and only briefly. In 1096 Afonso VI handed the county to his daughter Teresa and her husband Henrique of Burgundy, so the thing that later became a country started life as an administrative present inside a marriage. Here it lasted one generation. In 1120 Teresa gave the town away again.

Sources: www.cm-porto.pt, repositorio-aberto.up.pt p. 17

1120–1406

The bishop, for close to three hundred years. In 1120 Teresa passed the lordship of Porto and its charter of couto to Bishop Hugo and his successors, which put the town outside the king's reach. Hugo then did the clever thing: in 1123 he gave the residents a foral, a written set of rights, and the trade came because the rules were finally knowable. His couto ran far past the houses, out to Santo Ildefonso, Paranhos, Bonfim and Campanhã. The lane behind the cathedral is still called Rua de Dom Hugo.

Sources: www.cm-porto.pt, repositorio-aberto.up.pt p. 17

1406–

The king, and after him the town itself. In 1405 and 1406 the king bought the lordship off the bishop, partly against the rents from the houses on the new street down by the water, and Porto stopped being church property. The practical change landed at once: from 1406 it was the council alone, no longer the bishop's steward, that decided who counted as a citizen here. The town has kept that list itself ever since. I have heard every version of it read out.

Sources: repositorio-aberto.up.pt p. 21, repositorio-aberto.up.pt p. 113, www.cm-porto.pt

Three facts

Three things I know about this place.

1. For most of the Middle Ages a lane here was the width of Rua dos Mercadores, which is on this level and has never been widened. Then a new one was cut straight down towards the water, wide enough for two ox carts to pass side by side, its buildings put up all at once and matched to each other. People looked at it and thought it was a square. It is Rua do Infante D. Henrique now, and the square at the end of it carries the same name. Two ox carts abreast. I would need the whole afternoon.

   Sources: repositorio-aberto.up.pt p. 21

2. Rua das Flores was cut through ground belonging to the bishop and the chapter, and the houses on it were marked to show which of the two collected the rent: a wheel of Saint Catherine for the bishop, the archangel Michael for the chapter. The street was run from the new monastery of São Bento da Avé-Maria to the old convent of São Domingos, tying two squares together that then became centres of the local trade. Look above the doors as you walk it. The landlords signed their houses and nobody has scrubbed it off.

   Sources: www.cm-porto.pt

3. On 5 December 1996, in Mérida in Mexico, the historic centre of this city went onto the World Heritage list, together with the Luís I bridge and the monastery on the Serra do Pilar across the water, under the fourth cultural criterion. So a committee on another continent looked at this heap of lanes and voted to keep it exactly as it is. I had reached the same conclusion. It just took me longer.

   Sources: www.cm-porto.pt

Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.

• 176streets
• 1,622dots
• 24.4km of street
• 31.8km on foot
• 9.1hours at a stroll