Lisbon & Porto

Lisbon and Porto are only three hours apart by train and yet they feel like different countries. The capital is southern, sprawling and theatrical, built for the view; Porto is northern, granite, compact and unshowy, and it works for a living. Seeing them in one trip is the best way to understand Portugal, and the contrast is the point — most people arrive with a favourite in mind and leave having changed it.

Lisbon is a city of viewpoints. Half the pleasure of a day here is the walk between them: up through the Alfama's washing lines to the castle terrace, out to the Miradouro da Graça for the rooftops at dusk, down through the Baixa's grid to Praça do Comércio, where the square opens straight onto the Tagus. The trams and funiculars exist because the hills genuinely defeat people. Out at Belém stand the Jerónimos Monastery and the Belém Tower, both raised on the profits of the sea voyages, and the pastry shop that has kept the monks' custard-tart recipe since 1837. Sintra's palaces sit half an hour inland, the Atlantic beaches at Cascais the same distance west.

Porto is steeper, denser and altogether more characterful. The old quarter drops to the water at Ribeira in a jumble of tiled and shuttered houses, and the double-deck Dom Luís I bridge carries you across the gorge to Vila Nova de Gaia, where the port houses have been ageing wine in cool riverside cellars for three hundred years — Taylor's, Graham's, Sandeman and a dozen more, nearly all of them happy to pour. Back on the north bank, São Bento station is lined floor to ceiling with blue-and-white tiles, the Clérigos tower gives you the whole city from the top, and the Mercado do Bolhão and a plate of tripe or a francesinha will tell you more about Porto than any monument.

An hour east of the city the Douro begins in earnest, its terraces cut into schist by hand since the eighteenth century — the oldest demarcated wine region in the world and, by common consent, one of the loveliest river valleys anywhere. The season runs from April to October: spring for wildflowers and easy walking, high summer hot and bright, and September and October best of all, when the crowds thin and the harvest is under way in the quintas above Pinhão.