Porto, and the price of a daydream

Porto wears its weather. The granite goes near-black in the rain, and it rains sideways off the Atlantic more often than the postcards admit — then the sun cracks through over the Douro and the whole gorge lights up amber, and you forgive it everything. Mornings start slow: a cimbalino at the counter, a custard tart that is nothing like the ones back home, the tiled front of the café older than most countries.

The city is a staircase. You do not walk Porto so much as climb and descend it — Ribeira down at the water, the Sé looming over the roofs, funiculars and the two-tier Luís I bridge stitching the levels together. Locals in Cedofeita and Bonfim still shop where their grandmothers shopped: the drogaria, the peixaria, the cavernous Bolhão market. Tripe is the civic dish and they are proud of it — tripas à moda do Porto, the reason people from Lisbon still call them tripeiros, and they say it back like a badge.

Wine is the undertow. The lodges across the river in Gaia are where the port sleeps in oak, but the real ritual is a glass of cheap green vinho verde on a terrace as the container ships slide out to sea. Evenings are for a francesinha you will regret and love, live fado spilling out of a small room, the F.C. Porto match audible from three streets at once.

Then there is the other Porto — the one the daydream skips. The tourist crush on the Ribeira in August. The short-let keys jangling in stairwells where families used to live. The renovated-but-damp reality of a nineteenth-century building when the Atlantic gets in. It is one of Europe’s great cities to fall in love with. Falling in love is not the same as doing the sums.