“Saúde,” I said to my neighbor in halting Portuguese as I sipped a glass of sublimely sweet ruby port (midday hour be damned) at Graham’s winery and took in sweeping views of Porto across the Douro River. It was a pleasant if altogether predictable first act, and a little more than an hour later, I had gotten a hearty taste of the city’s traditional charms: I had devoured a pastel de nata, Portugal’s ubiquitous egg custard tart, and downed my accompanying galão, a lovely Iberian improvement on the cafe latte. I’d walked across the Dom Luís I bridge, through the Renaissance-era Ribeira square where river cruises departed, alongside trolleys up the steep embankment, past grand 19th-century neoclassical palaces and early 20th-century art nouveau cafes. Along the way I’d seen enough traditional painted ceramic tile, or azulejo, to make my eyes glaze: ornate single pieces sold as objets d’art, decorative squares embedded into baroque churches, entire facades of tenement houses rendered in a single vibrant hue, and massive blue-and-white friezes depicting historical scenes spanning the walls of the São Bento train station.
Then, turning onto an ancient alley called Rua da Madeira, I saw classic and contemporary collide on ceramic in a piece of public art that was more Frieze art fair than historical frieze: A massive ombre gray mural comprised of 3,000 tiles covered the entire face of a 15th-century tenement on which giant block letters spelled out Quem És, Porto?
“Who are you, Porto?” Good question, it made me think. Each tile contained an answer hand painted by a local. What from a distance had appeared pixelated was varied and textured up close with a range of responses: handprints, doodles, infinity symbols, sketches of the city’s famed bridges and scrawled statements ranging from sentimental (Cativante eterno “eternally captivating”) to snarky (Somos nos, “It’s us”).
In truth, the mural, a pointillist portrait of the city, turned out to be the best answer to its own question. It soon struck me that nothing personifies present-day Porto better than high-concept street art on a historic, centuries-old home, and the 2015 project by the art collective Locomotiva was merely the most outwardly obvious example of the artistic energy that has added currency city’s rich old-world appeal. Just as Portugal has emerged as an A-List destination on the world stage appearing on ever more influencers’ Instagram accounts, the city that gave the country its name has quietly become its beating creative heart, a haven for homegrown and expatriate tastemakers alike. Porto’s artistic explosion began in Bombarda, the neighborhood named for Rua Miguel Bombarda, where first one then another gallery took root during the depths of the economic crisis. Following a similar trajectory as Hoxton in London and Kreuzberg in Berlin, the thriving gallery scene gradually gave rise to chic boutiques, design ateliers, effortlessly hip cafes and bars and something less tangible but equally unmistakable: esprit de corps.
“At the moment, there's kind of the politics of optimism, and confidence,” says Suzanne Cotter, then-director of Museum of Contemporary Art at the Serralves Foundation, one of the pre-eminent cultural institutions in the city and country. As I looked around the terrace restaurant where Cotter and I are having an afternoon espresso, one large group of young couples is toasting with flutes of espumante while a young man in a slim-fitted suit another table raises an empty wine bottle to signal the waiter for another. “Part of what I see is that younger people in the creative spheres and all of the artists that I’ve invited have all said, ‘We'd like to move here,’" adds the Australian native, who left her post running Guggenheim Abu Dhabi for Serralves in early 2013 and was recently recruited to run the Mudam Luxembourg. “It is really immediate that people realize it's an interesting, cool place. It has a very strong contemporary spirit, which I think is a surprise to people. It's not just all about coming and eating grilled sardines.”
I saw that at as I walked around the grounds of the Serralves Foundation, home to a park dotted with both classical statues and pop art sculpture, an art deco villa and the contemporary art museum—a low-slung U-shaped white structure designed to mesh with the low, rolling landscape by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Álvaro Siza Vieira, a founder of the Porto school. In recent years, the Serralves museum has gone beyond the expected and risen from respected institution to essential player in international contemporary art scene. It’s rich in modern masters—when the Portuguese government halted its plan to auction off its collection of 84 works by Joan Miró, it sent them to Serralves, which presented the first public exhibition of the pieces. The museum’s rising profile helped attract new talent as well as world-class artists, such as Ethiopian-American painter Julie Mehretu, whose large canvases painted over maps and topographic charts were dazzling in the light-drenched main galleries. Not surprisingly, the Serralves is both the most esteemed and the most visited museum in the country and increasingly, like Porto itself, it attracts a savvy, sophisticated crowd. “The visitor to this city is a cultural tourist,” says Cotter. “You can go to the beach here, but people are not coming here to just lie on the beach for 10 days.”
And yet I wouldn’t blame them if they did. After leaving Serralves, I took a tram out to the upscale enclave Foz, whose leafy boulevards lined with immaculate townhouses spilled onto an esplanade beside a tan sand beach strewn with rock outcroppings. As windsurfers skipped waves in the distance, I slid onto a cushioned sofa at Praia da Luz, a bar right on the sand where, after a few white wine sangrias, I could convince myself that the trolley had deposited me on a laid-back Balearic isle.
So I was overjoyed that any proper cultural tour of Porto actually requires a day at the beach. The next morning, I made my way to Leça da Palmeira’s Piscinas de Marés (Tidal Pools), perhaps the world’s most important architectural work where water wings are permitted. Designed by Siza Vieira in 1966, the concrete complex is centered around a pair of seawater pools—one for adults and one for children—that alternately emerge from and disappear into the coastline’s jagged granite outcroppings. It’s a stunning fusion of brutalism and organic architecture that deeply influenced Zaha Hadid, though it’s unclear how much those bona fides matter to the bathers. After falling into disrepair and closing in the early 2000s, the tidal pools are again very much still in use.
Historically, this city has embraced the marriage of form and function. Some of this stems from the region’s role as the industrial center of the country (more than one local I met used the expression “the north makes, the south takes”). I was struck by the fact that Porto has its own wrought-iron masterpiece by Gustave Eiffel, which is not a monument but rather a railroad bridge, Ponte Maria Pia (the Dom Luís I bridge was built by one Eiffel’s disciples nine years later). It’s similar with modern prestige projects. Rem Koolhaas’ Casa da Música has been hailed as the acclaimed Dutch architect’s most attractive work since opening in 2005, but amid all Koolhass’ innovative uses of space, he had no choice but to rely on a traditional shoe-box auditorium shape to ensure its acoustics passed muster (they are considered some of the best in the world). As I viewed it from different vantage points on the expansive roundabout the Rotunda da Boavista, Casa da Música’s asymmetrical polyhedron-like exterior appeared to morph, its proportions of glass and stone seemingly different from each new angle.
“Porto is a city of facades,” Carlos Almeida, a PR executive for furniture designers and cork manufacturers, told me over bottles of Super Bock, the lager of choice among locals. Metaphorical value aside, my newfound friend was speaking literally about preservation regulations in the city’s downtown. “You cannot change the facade, but you never know what’s inside—how new, how modern, how unexpected. They are pushing people not to replace what exists, but to improve what has been forgotten for years.” I saw this at work in my choice of hotels. While there is no shortage of lovely options (for instance, The Yeatman, a “luxury wine hotel” set among the port cellars in Gaia, and the Intercontinental Porto - Palacio Das Cardosas on the city’s central square, Praça da Liberdade), I split my time between two enchanting reclamation projects: I began my visit at the Rosa Et Al Townhouse in Bombarda, a meticulously restored boutique B&B now containing six airy suites with exposed beams that are appointed with an array of elegant mid-century antiques. I finished my stay at the Pestana Vintage, whose 109 modern rooms are spread across a row of interconnected 16th-century buildings that comprise a UNESCO World Heritage Site on Ribeira Square, and right on the banks of the Douro. The irregular hall widths and ceiling heights, which could have been an annoyance, only added to the charms.
The traditional and timely mesh easily in other ways as well. Porto’s first Michelin-starred restaurant Casa de Chá da Boa Nova, the Tea House, is housed in another another early Siza Vieira work less than a mile up the coast from the Tidal Pools. Restored and reopened by chef Rui Paula in 2014, the Tea House’s interior is lined with African hardwood ceilings, walls and floors that frame the floor-to-ceiling sea views. Paula serves three tasting menus, all seafood-centric to varying degrees, which are plated with an eye for color and constructed like edible origami. But things are actually not as fussy as they appear. Until 2009, Paula was a chef at El Celler de Can Roca in Girona, Spain, the three Michelin-starred cathedral of molecular gastronomy that was named the Best Restaurant in the World in 2013. When he returned home, he craved something simpler but still sophisticated. His restaurants, DOP in downtown Porto and DOC in the Duoro Valley, offer elevated traditional fare. “The cuisine of my mother,” Paula says. The Tea House represents an aesthetic experience and a gastronomical one. Referring to the sea urchin crème brûlée, Paula says: “This for me is a simple thing, just with good presentation—not molecular.” It’s made like any crème brûlée, he explains right down to the blowtorch caramelization, but with sea urchin, whose creamy texture blends with the custard while its briny flavor replaces the sweetness. Even without the wine pairings, lunch is a languid, luxurious affair. Mine took a good three hours from sparkling wine on the veranda to tawny port and coffee. Before I departed, Paula pointed out where graffiti had covered the long idle building when he took it over in 2013, boldly signing a 30-year lease as Porto still reeled from the great recession. “Now it's not crazy,” he says, laughing. “Now it's ‘He’s a visionary.’”
That night I made my way to Bombarda, retracing my steps from previous days, past Clérigos tower, which rises from a Baroque church at the top of an embankment, the lone spire piercing a skyline in a blessedly free of skyscrapers; and past the Lello bookshop, with its undulating, organic art deco staircases, which reportedly inspired J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. I’d strolled along Rua Miguel Bombarda on several occasions already and each time the street seemed too small to have generated such a powerful shift in the city’s fortunes. As I approached the gallery that was ground zero for this rebirth, Múrias Centeno, I saw it was indeed unable to contain its fans, who spilled out onto the street. The occasion was an opening for Pedro Wirz, a Brazilian mixed media artist and sculptor.
In between sips of beer, I tried to catch sight of Wirz’s textured, coil-like sculptures and traded pleasantries with the multigenerational mix of art aficionados: Parental figures, some with their children; professionals in smart monochromatic suits; scruffy bohemians and young fashion types—the men comparing collectible sneakers and the women in dresses and patchwork patterned pants that looked like Martin Margiela but were, I was told, from one of the area’s top designers, Ana Seguardo.
I finally caught up to Nuno Centeno, a whirling wiry energy, in the back of the gallery where he keeps a desk amid unhung canvasses and crates bearing labels from Art Madrid, Art Basel Miami, and the Frieze Art fair. “I started in 2007 at the same time as A Certain Lack of Coherence, which was artist run,” he says, referring to the underground art space that along with his gallery has elevated Porto’s contemporary art scene. “We decided that we would make it with money or without money.” Initially called Reflexus, Centeno’s gallery moved onto Rua Miguel Bombarda in 2009, where he began representing rising stars such as Adriano Costa, Dan Rees, and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané. “We were definitely pioneers in this. We really believed that Porto had something special,” says Centeno. “As soon as these young international artists started to come here to do our shows, they were kind of amazed with the city. It was small; it was magical in a way. Now we have this, it's crazy nowadays.”
In 2014, Centeno partnered with Bruno Múrias and opened a white cube space in Lisbon, which requires him to split time between the cities. “Everyone says that Porto is more magical. It's better here for creation,” Centeno says. He points to the legacy of the repressive dictatorship that held the country until the Carnation Revolution in 1974-75. “Lisbon is the capital, with all that goes with that and remember until 40 years ago, we had a dictator there. In the school, if you were studying art, you were copying the statues of the main squares. In Porto you had much more freedom, because we were not so controlled.” The dynamics have changed but Porto hasn’t relinquished creative edge. “Now creative people they are moving from Brussels, they are moving from Berlin, London, Paris, Barcelona.”
And there was Wirz—living, breathing, sculpting, surfing proof of Porto’s pull. “I lived in many big cities—Rome, Paris, New York,” he says. Sporting short, choppy hair and a full brown beard, Wirz resembles a more boyish Jared Leto. He came here eight months earlier to meet with Centeno about a show and never left. He quickly rented a loft space overlooking the roundabout Rotunda da Boavista that, as it attracted art students and younger artists, has evolved into alternative exhibition space called Panorama Boa Vista (“It’s by appointment but we’ll show to anyone who rings the bell”). ”I think people want to go where there's good creative energy and bask in it,” he says. “It's an interesting place to be. It’s happening. It’s really...alive.”
As the opening began to dissipate, I stopped in at Oficina, an upscale bistro in a converted mechanic’s shop on Rua Miguel Bombarda, which cheekily poked fun at its own patrons with a neon sign that read “Fuck Art Let’s Eat,” and did just that, ordering bacalhao that was served on corn bread and a crisp vinho verde. Afterwards, I found my way to Candelabro, the corner bar in an old bookstore space that had seemed to have already become a regular stop. I felt indebted, as a patron there turned me on to my new drink of choice white port—the lowliest of the fortified wine I’ve been told—and tonic. It was, she explained, the only way locals drink Port wine. It was also the perfect refreshing cocktail on a sultry summer evening. Inside the bar, as ‘60s French pop played over the stereo, I recognized several faces from the gallery. As I waded in, I was in a surprised to find myself being hugged by Carlos Almeida. After a laugh, he reminded me how small Porto can feel. “As I say, Porto, it's a big village,” Almeida said, echoing me what he’d told me earlier. “You want to know ‘Who are you Porto?’ Here people will know each other in the street. If you go, two or three times to the same café, for sure, the fourth time the guy will know how you prefer your coffee and which cheese sandwich you like. It’s a village.” Just as I leaned onto the wooden bar top and prepared to place my order, the bartender disappeared. Before I could register my disappointment, he had returned and deposited white port and tonic, with a twist of lime, in front of me, shaken my hand and said loudly to be heard over the music: “Saúde.”
