The fish market opens before dawn, and if you're there early enough, you catch the moment the city remembers itself.

I arrived in Porto at 4:47 in the morning, having miscalculated a bus connection from Braga. The streets were still damp from a rain I'd slept through, and the only light came from a bakery where a woman in a flour-dusted apron was pulling trays from an oven. She didn't look up. The smell of warm bread followed me for two blocks.

Porto doesn't perform for visitors. That's what I love most about it. The azulejo-tiled facades are peeling in places, salt-weathered and honest, and the riverfront cafés don't pretend the sardine cans are anything other than sardine cans. Somewhere between the Douro and the upper labyrinth of Bairro da Sé, I found a hardware store that also sold wine, presided over by a man named Rui who spoke no English and still managed to explain, through gesture and a hand-drawn map on a paper bag, exactly where I should eat dinner.

I followed his map to a room with six tables and a television showing football. The caldo verde arrived before I'd finished sitting down — that bright green soup of kale and potato that tastes like someone's grandmother made it specifically for you. There was bread on the table without asking. A cat moved under my chair.

Afterwards I climbed back through narrow stone streets to the miradouro above the cathedral, where the city spread out below in terracotta and shadow. A teenager was practicing guitar badly and beautifully. An older couple stood close together, not speaking.

Porto has this quality of saudade built into its geography — longing made visible in the way the river bends away, the way light leaves the rooftops. You don't so much visit it as feel, briefly, that you belong somewhere.

#travel #portugal #porto #wanderlust