Vila Nova de Gaia

Porto gets all the acclaim but Gaia is a destination itself.   It’s the stepsister to Porto but she does alright for herself.  She has a lovely riverside promenade with sunny restaurants, bistros, and shops.  Lots of beautiful river cruise ships make port here.  The city’s true glory is Gaia’s wine caves.  There are twenty-one wineries and wine tasting shops in and around Gaia.  And there are at least ten wine caves in the city where port wine is aged in a natural cave climate.

It has historic value in that in 1255, this town was given the key to riches.  That is the time that King Dom. Alfonzo III declared the village of Gaia a recognized town with administration and a charter.  — I think our street was in existence at that time!  That declaration opened the Gaia side of the river to wine traders and merchants and enabled them to avoid the heavy taxation on the other side of the river in Porto. Winemakers and traders moved in.  Even still today, grapes for Port wine are grown only in the Douro Valley and aged only in Gaia.  This means, that Port wine probably should be called Douro Wine or Gaia Wine as its production has nothing to do with Porto.

We followed the recommended walking tour in Gaia.  Whew!  This meant walking up and down past museums, churches, the very pretty city hall, and the wonderful park, Morro’s Garden, where an outdoor concert was readying itself for the evening’s outdoor concert.  We have become such old fogies!  The concert began at 9:30 pm.  Nine-thirty??  Why we are in our PJs by then!  We could faintly hear the music from our window and with binoculars, we could see the crowd lounging on the lawn listening to the music.

While our apartment is in a section of Gaia’s Old Town, the other parts of the city are very modern with big wide boulevards with metro lines and buses crisscrossing the city moving people about.  We found the Gaia train station where we plan to take one of their lines to a nearby town to see what lies beyond.

We finished up the Gaia route on the plaza of the great Serra Do Pilar Monastery.  Constructed in about 1537, this place is considered one of the best examples of Mannerist architecture with its round footprint and design.  This very unique-looking place is one of the main symbols of Gaia and can be seen from almost every viewpoint in Gaia and Porto as well.  Its plaza provides one of the very best locations for breathtaking, panoramic views of the river and the cities on either bank.  One can enter church only on Sundays during a morning mass.

Sunday was museum day for us.  Around the world, most museums are closed on Mondays and here, museums are free on Sundays.  We had planned to visit all of the City Museums in Porto but we moved slowly this Sunday morning and left the apartment at about noon.  We visited the Casa do Infante, the original mint of Portugal.  While much of the old mint is gone, some of the walls we saw were the actual ones that stood here in the 13^th century – my, that’s old.  Much of the Museum’s focus was on Henry the Navigator and on Portuguese conquests in search of silver, gold, and later, other precious trading items like spices, sugar, and dyes.  All of which made Portuguese nobility and churches super wealthy.

We spent considerable time in the Museu Vinho do Porto.  This was a simple but very fascinating museum.  It depicted the creation of the wine and olive terraces in this hilly, rocky place called Portugal.  We’ve been curious about how and when those terraces were built.  They exist throughout Portugal.  Teams of men worked for years breaking, blasting, and mortaring rock together to create the terraces and planted grape vines among the rocks.  They flourished.  A movie made in the late 50s we think, depicted the trip up and down the Douro on Rabelos filled with empty barrels through the Douro Valley.  In some sections of the river, the flat-bottomed Rabelos were powered by oar, sometimes by sail and yet sometimes, the boat had to be pulled through strong rapids by men on land, with ropes, and with oxen.  Along the way, the crew stopped at vineyards to exchange empties for filled barrels of wine ready to be aged in Gaia.  The return journey was equally dangerous with only men rowing long oars in rhythmic time and the long rudder-like device called espdela guiding the boat through narrow rocky channels and over rapids.  The trip from Gaia to near the Spanish border and return took a week or ten days in which the crew of about 7 men ate, slept, and worked.  I hope we learn more about this process and how it has changed today on a day cruise we plan to make this week.

Today, replica Rabelos are built in a traditional shipbuilding yard just down from us on the waterfront.  Instead of carting wine, these graceful, long but flat-bottomed Rabelos, now motored, cart tourists up and down a short section of the Douro on a sightseeing ride. 

At a very late lunch on the Rue dos Flores, we enjoyed one of the very best tasting sandwiches we’ve ever had– it’s called a Francesinha, a traditional Porto dish.  I’m glad I couldn’t see the nutritional value as it must have zillions of calories.  It has thinly sliced ham, Portuguese smoky sausage, and a bit of roast beef sandwiched between slices of toasted Portuguese bread, covered, I mean covered, in melted cheese and served floating in a spicy red beer sauce.  Crazy good!  Truly, crazy good!  Sharing one between us was perfect.  The highlight of our meal, though, was chatting with a young couple from South Africa at a nearby table.  They’ve been married seven years and this is the first trip they’ve taken alone since their son was born three years ago.  What a delight!  We talked about their travels and our travels and their hopes to have forty-seven years together as Stan and I have.  Our visit made our day . . . and theirs too, I think.