Porto Historic Center & River | Self-Guided Audio Walking Tour

Highlights

Inclusions

Itinerary

1. Porto's 75-metre baroque bell tower by the Italian architect Nicolau Nasoni, long the symbol of the city. Climb its 240 steps for the view over the whole descent ahead.

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2. A 1906 bookshop built like a shrine, with a carved forked staircase and stained-glass skylight. Rated among the world's most beautiful, and a lesson in the staged interior.

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3. A baroque church whose entire side wall is a blue-and-white azulejo panel, added in 1912. Beside it hides the Casa Escondida, a lived-in house barely a metre wide.

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4. Porto's grand civic boulevard of bare monumental granite, crowned by the City Hall's 70-metre clock tower. Here the tiled and gilded surfaces fall away to plain stone.

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5. A working railway station whose hall holds some 20,000 azulejo tiles painting the nation's history, by Jorge Colaco. Free to enter and still in daily use.

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6. orto's Romanesque cathedral on the highest hill, cut to be a fortress as much as a church. Where the city began, and where a 1387 royal wedding bound Portugal to England.

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7. A 19th-century stock-exchange palace built by the city's merchants, not a king, on a burned convent. Its Arab Room took nearly 20 years to gild. Guided tour only.

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8. A plain Gothic church whose interior is smothered in hundreds of kilograms of gilded woodwork, with an ossuary of thousands of bones beneath. Gold above, bone below.

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9. A medieval customs house built over a Roman villa, where the river's cargo was taxed. By tradition the birthplace of Henry the Navigator, though the story is legend, not fact.

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10. The medieval merchant square on the Douro quay, arcaded after a 1491 fire and now UNESCO World Heritage. Portugal's very name grew from the Roman port here, Portus Cale.

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11. The double-deck iron arch of 1886 that finally joined the two banks of the Douro. Designed by Theophile Seyrig, not Eiffel. Walk out onto it for the widest river view.

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Cancellation

Free cancellation up to 24 hours before the experience starts, for a full refund.

Know before you go

How it compares in Porto

• Its from-price is 96% below the median of the 1667 experiences we list in Porto.
• It is shorter than most of them.
• The operator lists free cancellation on it.

About Porto

Porto tumbles down steep hills to the Douro River, a granite city of tiled churches, riverside cellars and port wine aged across the water.

The Ribeira district lines the riverbank with colourful houses, cafés and boats, part of a UNESCO-listed old centre beneath the iron arches of the Dom Luís I Bridge. Above it, the São Bento station hall is covered in blue-and-white azulejo tiles, the Clérigos Tower rises above the rooftops, and the Sé cathedral stands on its hill.

Top-ranked sights in Porto: Clérigos Church and Tower (Torre & Igreja dos Clérigos), Dom Luis Bridge (Ponte de Dom Luis I), Porto Cathedral (Sé Catedral do Porto).

See all 1667 experiences in Porto