Porto’s been receiving quite a lot of press in the last couple of years, as a tourist destination. I notice travel articles in mainstream media and social media daily. It wasn’t like this only a few short years ago.
At the time when I bought my first plane ticket for Portugal in Spring 2011, two years before I became a resident, none of my friends had been to Porto or could tell me anything about the city. I felt like some kind of a pioneer in my circles, nevermind that the city’s been around more than 800 years. Not knowing anything about Porto was a major part of the appeal for including it in my birthday trip tradition, which is to visit a country completely new to me.
It’s been nearly five years since that first trip, and nearly two and half years since Porto became home turf. Already I’ve noticed plenty of changes, from major renovations to increases in prices. Closures, openings. Pedestrian traffic, tourist traffic: walking tours, tour buses, tuk-tuk tours, Segway tours, Vespa tours, motorcycles-with-sidecar tours. Tourists generally cluster in the historic centre, but the city is changing in other areas, too.
One way to keep on top of these changes is to photograph them. Partly because my memory is faulty and so is my perception of the passing of time. I continue to photograph Porto’s skyline because the cranes keep moving around. If I’d thought of it sooner, I would’ve set up a fixed spot and shot frames in regular intervals to make a time lapse photo. But in the absence of that, I’ll keep taking photos from across the river at Cais de Gaia and post them here.
February 22, 2016
Album: Portugal [Winter 2015/2016]