European Adventures: Porto, Portugal.

Portugal was definitely my favourite place to visit on my backpacking trip with my friend Leanne. We spent the first few days in Porto and stayed at Tattva Design Hostel. The hostel was in a great location and had incredible staff! The first night we were there, we spent the evening drinking wine and an entire bottle of port with the staff and a few of the guys who we met at the hostel. After drinking so much liquor we needed some food so the guys who worked at the hostel took us out to one of their favourite restaurants. It happened to be closed but they knew the owners so they let us in and made us some of their favourite dishes. My memories of this night are a bit foggy but I definitely remember sausage being a part of what we ate.

While we were in Porto we spent a lot of time walking through the city streets, admiring the beautiful views and architecture. I love how each country in Europe feels to have their own distinct style of architecture.

Church in Porto.

You can’t visit Porto without doing a port tasting. We decided on Calem for our tour. I loved learning about the process of making port. At the end of the tour we tried three ports paired with chocolate. My favourite port that I tried was a 10 year aged tawny. I found it the best because it was the least sweet of the ones we sampled.

Streets of Porto.

On our last day in Porto, we decided to take a day trip to Guimaraes, a beautiful medieval town about an hour train ride from Porto. Guimaraes is lovely, but I would only recommend going during tourist season. Because we went there at the end of November, there was almost nothing open and we had a hard time navigating where to go and even finding somewhere to stop for lunch.

Walking through the streets of Guimaraes.

Guimaraes castle.

I am so glad we spent time in Porto and Guimaraes. These are definitely places I would visit again. Have you been to Portugal to visit? What was your favourite Portuguese dish? Did you get a tour of any of their wineries?