Douro Valley N222 from Porto

Scenic road chapters

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Porto

   Porto stacks itself up the north bank of the Douro like a deck of cards, with the tiled houses and church towers tumbling down toward the river and the iron arch of the Dom Luís bridge holding it all together. The city has about a quarter of a million people, a lot of granite, and a love of tripe and francesinha, a sandwich of steak, sausage and ham covered with melted cheese and a beer-and-tomato sauce. The Ribeira district along the water is a World Heritage site and a good place to wander, if you do not mind the steep, polished cobbles and the crowds.

   Read the complete Porto write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Porto is where the day begins. Next is Amarante.

2. 2. Amarante

   Amarante is a handsome town on the banks of the Tâmega, a river that runs out of the hills toward the Douro, and it is built around an old stone bridge. The bridge, dedicated to São Gonçalo, the town's patron saint, was the scene of a fierce stand during the Peninsular War, when local forces held back a French army under Marshal Soult for two weeks in 1809, and the town remembers it with pride. Behind the bridge rises the church and convent of São Gonçalo, with its fine cloister and a tall, tiered facade, and the houses along the river lean over the water with iron balconies and washing lines.

   Read the complete Amarante write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Amarante comes up about 61 km into the recorded legs. Next is Peso da Regua.

3. 3. Peso da Regua

   Régua sits on the south bank of the Douro river, a working town of about five thousand people, and it is the capital of the oldest demarcated wine region in the world. In 1756 the Marquis of Pombal, the chief minister of Portugal, set the borders of the Port wine district to protect quality and prices, and the steep schist hillsides terraced with vines around the town have been cultivated for centuries. The landscape, with stone walls rising in steps from the river, was listed by UNESCO in 2001 as an example of a cultural landscape shaped by human labour, and it is one of the most beautiful in Europe.

   Read the complete Peso da Regua write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   about 99 km into the recorded legs you reach Peso da Regua. Next is Pinhao.

4. 4. Pinhão

   Pinhão is a small town on the Douro whose most memorable building is a railway station. Inside, the walls are covered in blue-and-white azulejo tiles that show scenes of wine harvests and life along the river, painted in the early twentieth century, and they give the little platform the look of a gallery. The trains no longer carry port wine barrels downriver, but a line still runs through the valley, and a few tourist trains stop here.

   Read the complete Pinhao write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Pinhao, late in the day. Next is Vila Nova de Foz Coa.

5. 5. Vila Nova de Foz Coa

   In 1991 a young archaeologist named Nelson Rebanda saw something strange on the walls of the Côa valley, a series of animals scratched into the schist cliffs, and the world of prehistory changed. Over the next few years more than a thousand engravings were recorded along the river, of aurochs, horses, ibex and deer, some of them more than twenty thousand years old, making this the largest open-air collection of Palaeolithic art in the world. The images had been under the open sky all that time, with the river flowing past.

   Read the complete Vila Nova de Foz Côa write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Finish at Vila Nova de Foz Coa. That is the ride.