I recently spent a weekend in Porto. I’d been to Porto a few years ago and I have to admit that I didn’t really like it that much. It probably didn’t help that I spent a few days in Lisbon before coming to Porto and comparing those two cities directly, Lisbon will always win for me.

But when my friend Jayna said that she was going and invited me to come along, I thought I’d give the city another chance. I hadn’t really travelled anywhere for a while, so I was desperate to get out of London and see something different.

It also helped that flights were cheap and Porto itself is not very expensive either.

The weekend started with an early Friday morning Easyjet experience. Always a pleasure.

From here it could only get better. And it did! We arrived in Porto to beautiful sunny weather and in time for lunch.

Roast pork sandwiches!

After lunch we decided to make the most of the weather and walked around the city taking photos.

I developed a keen interest in the local laundry. So keen that I wrote a separate blog post about it. Read it here.

After a while we stopped here to drink coffee and eat egg tarts in the sun. I don’t drink coffee so I accidentally had the thickest hot chocolate ever in my life. You could stand your spoon in it.

I like the little kiosk places.

All the tiled houses were so beautiful! Although some were quite run down.

OK, better not park here…

Jayna had been to Porto quite recently and also has a habit of being well prepared so she showed us the beautiful corners of the city. Including this viewpoint:

When the sun was getting lower, we started making our way towards the river.

We wanted to watch the sunset by the river. On the way we passed areas that would normally be tourist hotspots but they were all completely empty. You could tell that we were in off-season.

But directly by the river there were people sitting in the sun. We came at the right time for the sunset. It was beautiful!

We crossed the bridge to get to the other side of the river where all the porthouses are. Time for some port wine tasting.

We had dinner at a seafood restaurant by the river (not pictured). But Yishyene was raving about the amazing octopus salad that a tapas place near the town centre had, so we decided to go there after dinner. To eat more and drink more.

Here’s us drinking €1 sparkling red wine. Yishyene’s boyfriend taught us how to order the drink in Portuguese but I’ve already forgotten.

And this is the octopus salad. It was pretty good! Nice big chunks of fried octopus, peppers and onions. I intend to recreate it at home with the canned octopus that I bought in Porto.

And that concluded day one of our Porto weekend!