Oporto Six Bridges Cruise

Porto was built on both sides of a gorge, which is why it has so many bridges and why they are so tall. The six-bridges cruise is the short version of the city seen properly: you go out into the middle of the Douro on a rabelo, turn upstream and down, and pass beneath the lot in under an hour.

A rabelo is a flat-bottomed wooden boat with a single square sail and a long steering oar at the stern. Before the river was dammed, these carried barrels of port down from the terraced vineyards of the Douro valley to the lodges at Vila Nova de Gaia, through rapids that no longer exist. The ones on the water now carry passengers instead, but the shape is the same, and a few still sit moored along the Gaia bank with barrels on deck as advertising for the houses behind them.

Going by the river, the cruise passes the Arrábida, a single concrete arch that was the longest of its kind in the world when it opened in 1963; the Dom Luís I, the double-deck iron arch that everybody photographs, designed by Théophile Seyrig; and the Infante Dom Henrique, a low modern concrete span beside it.

Upstream come the Maria Pia, a slender iron railway arch built by Gustave Eiffel’s company in 1877 and now retired; the São João, the concrete bridge that replaced it and still carries the trains; and finally the Freixo, the furthest out, carrying the ring road across the water.

The cruise is about fifty minutes and does not stop, so there is no getting off halfway. Audio commentary is provided in several languages — confirm yours when you book.

Sit on the open deck for the photographs and the bridges going over you, but the river throws up a wind even on warm days, so take a layer. Sailings run more often in summer than in winter, and the operator may alter or cancel a departure in bad weather or high water.