Our Belgian couchsurfer arrived today to walk the Camino de Santiago, with Porto serving as the gateway airport and city for her trip. The proximity of the Camino is a common way for many people to discover Porto, along with seat sales and direct flights on low-cost airlines, word-of-mouth, articles in the travel section of the newspaper, in-flight magazines, or social media. Oh, and blogs like this one.
A number of my friends have visited me here, mostly from Toronto as it’s home to the largest Portuguese community in Canada. Toronto/Montreal to Lisbon/Porto are well-established travel routes for Portuguese-Canadians. But of all of the friends who’ve visited, none were Portuguese, it was everyone’s first trip to Porto, and almost no-one had stepped foot in Portugal before. Today is also the day when a friend booked his first visit here, in February 2017. Our first reservation for 2017!
I’m going to answer my own question of “What brings you to Porto?” I chose it in 2011 because I didn’t know anything about Porto, either, at the time. That was the whole point of the birthday trips — to go somewhere new and discover it for myself.
July 21, 2016
Album: Portugal [Summer 2016]