#88 Harry Potter in Porto

March 9-10, 2022: Aveiro, Porto (No. 88)

The very mixed weather continues. It was pouring rain this morning as well. After a short drive, we arrived in Aveiro and, behold, there was a rain break. We took advantage of this to visit the Venice of Portugal. In Aveiro, there are a lot of small and large bridges, and the boat tours are very popular with tourists. When we arrived on foot in the city center, one of the many colorful boats with a few tourists aboard came into the harbor. The tourists on the boat were all completely soaked and seemed eager to get back on land. We were lucky and it stayed dry for exactly one hour. Here are some impressions of Aveiro...

The rest of the day it kept raining steadily, and we used the time to do laundry and drive to Porto. The Porto region has the most toll roads in Portugal, but we didn't want to use them. So we drove on many roads with bad pavement and through many small villages to Porto.

The next day, we went to the city center of Porto in a light drizzle. Porto is a beautiful city on a slope. Unfortunately, the drizzle lasted almost the whole day, so we could only enjoy our stay to a limited extent. The many great views from one side of the river to the other were often very foggy, and the wind whistled through the narrow streets.

There is a rumor that J.K. Rowling drew a lot of inspiration from Porto and northern Portugal for her Harry Potter books, as she lived in Porto for a long time. Some monasteries or even the university in Coimbra can certainly be found in some form in the books.A bookshop in Porto looks almost the same as in the movie, although J.K. Rowling denies having taken it as a model. Nevertheless, the influx of many Harry Potter fans is large, to take a look at this beautiful 19th-century bookstore.

Since the rain in northern Portugal would not really clear up in the next two weeks either, we decided in the evening to declare our trip in Portugal over and drive back to Spain. But more on that later...

Day 146 - Total tour 9,706 km

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