Northern Portugal is often overlooked by tourists who favor the capital city of Lisbon in the south, or Portugal's neighboring country & my current homeland, Spain. To be honest, Portugal was never really on my radar of places I really wanted to visit during my time living abroad in Spain. But if there is one thing I've learned while living in Europe, it's that sometimes the most unexpected cities and countries are the most beautiful. We all know that Paris, London, and Barcelona are incredible, but some of my fondest traveling memories are from my trips to Prague, Salamanca, and Granada. It's always nice to get off of the beaten tourist track and get swept away by the beauty of a new language, cuisine, and culture.
{vino break at Bolhao Wine House in the Bolhao Market}
I ended up in Porto with three of my girlfriends because we discovered a 60 euro round-trip RyanAir flight from Madrid - way too good of a deal to pass up for a quick and easy weekend trip! We only spent one hour in the air before we were deplaning on the Porto airport's tarmac. Before leaving for our trip, the four of us girls got together for coffee and to discuss our travel personalities, as we had never traveled together before. We quickly came to realize that we were going to be a group created by the travel gods, seeing as we all had three very important goals for the trip in common: we wanted to wander around aimlessly and take a million pictures, stop often for food & wine breaks, and not enter a single museum. Bingo! I think we were meant to be travel companions.
