Porto and the river that gave its name to a wine

Port wine takes its name from Porto, the city at the mouth of the Douro, which is a little unfair on the valley some seventy miles upriver where the grapes actually grow. For centuries, the wine made its way down to the city's cellars the only way it could: loaded onto rabelos, flat-bottomed boats with a single square sail, built to survive a river that in winter flood could be genuinely dangerous and in summer could run too shallow to float a loaded boat at all. The boats gave their cargo its shipping name, and the name stuck to the wine, even after dams tamed the river in the twentieth century and the rabelos became, for the most part, a pleasant way to cross the water rather than a working necessity.

The world's first regulated wine region

The Douro's claim to fame goes beyond the drama of getting the wine downriver. In 1756, the Marquês de Pombal, the reforming minister who would soon oversee Lisbon's reconstruction after the great earthquake, established fixed boundaries and quality controls for the Douro wine region, generally reckoned to be the first wine region in the world to be formally demarcated and regulated by government decree, more than a century before Bordeaux or Rioja followed suit. The terraced vineyards that result, cut into impossibly steep schist hillsides along both banks of the river, are themselves a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape, farmed by hand in places too steep for any machine.

Two bridges, one river, two engineers

Back in Porto, the city and its wine cellars face each other across the water: the cellars, by long tradition, sit on the Vila Nova de Gaia side, where the lodges that mature and blend Port still operate today. Six bridges cross between them, and two are worth knowing apart. The Maria Pia railway bridge, completed in 1877, was built by Gustave Eiffel's engineering company, a graceful single-arch span that predates his tower in Paris by more than a decade. The double-decked Dom Luís I Bridge, finished in 1886 a little further downstream, was designed by Théophile Seyrig, an engineer who had trained under Eiffel and then struck out on his own; its upper deck now carries a metro line and pedestrians high above the river, with views back over the cellars it was, in a sense, always going to end up overlooking.

Seeing the valley itself

A short river cruise from Porto is the easiest way to see the terraces properly, since the roads through the valley are narrow, slow and frequently more interested in the view than in getting anywhere quickly. Just You's week aboard a Douro river ship calls at Pinhão and Régua, both working wine towns, and at Barca d'Alva, close to the Spanish border where the river itself rises. Those who would rather combine the valley with the rest of the country can take Just You's week-long tour of the country, which threads through Lamego and Peso da Régua before continuing on to Porto, Guimarães, Aveiro, Coimbra and the Lisbon coast, treating the wine valley as one chapter in a longer story rather than the whole trip.

An eleven-night walking holiday from Explore goes further still, starting in Madrid and following old wine-country paths west through Zamora and Fermoselle before crossing into Portugal at the Douro itself and finishing in Porto, a slow approach on foot to a valley most visitors only ever see from a car window or a glass. Both routes end up, eventually, in the same cellars on the Gaia side of the river, tasting the results of a walk or a drive that the wine itself once had to make by boat.

Whichever way you arrive, the confusion in the name is worth keeping in mind. The city gave the wine its shipping address. The valley did all the actual work.