CRUISING THE DOURO RIVER
Discover vineyards, heritage sites of stunning valley in Portugal
Portuguese sailors opened up the other half of the world.
Guys like Vasco da Gama, Ferdinand Magellan, Christopher Columbus and Pedro Alvares Cabral had no fear of the sea and dared to venture beyond the horizon to open trade routes between Europe and India, Africa, Asia, South America and North America.
Now a group of Portuguese sailors are looking inland and opening their own country to the world. They’re not shipping out in leaky old sailing ships like their forefa- thers, but instead manning luxury hotel barges that offer all the amenities of a land-based resort.
You had to be a pretty rugged and courageous sailor to tackle the Douro River that flows into the Atlantic Ocean at the historic Portuguese port of Porto, and you wouldn’t want to be a paying passenger without a life-jacket and Gravol.
But that was before the Portuguese and Spanish governments teamed up in the ’90s to tame the river by building six different dams with lift locks. The whitewater rapids are gone, but the spectacular scenery of the Douro Valley remains.
The valley, with the wide river cutting through it, is an UNESCO World Heritage site and the birthplace of some of the world’s finest wines. This past spring, Australian tourism company Scenic Tours started offering 11-day cruises up the river from its mouth in Porto, which is also an UNESCO World Heritage site.
The 900 kilometre-long river is the boundary between Portugal and Spain for several hundred kilometres, but much of the Douro is unnavigable as it tumbles out of the mountain in Castile, Spain.
The three-deck-high cruise vessel Scenic Azure carries 96 passengers and has a 2:1 ratio of guests to staff. All staff members are Portuguese and each can tell you something interesting about the history, culture and world-renowned wines of the Douro Valley, where most of them grew up.
However, there are five staff members who specialize in the valley. They take you ashore on bus tours of wineries, castles, museums, monasteries, quaint villages, and the Spanish city of Salamanca, home to Europe’s third oldest university.
The Romans started growing grapes and making wine on the hillsides of the Douro Valley 4,000 years ago. The steep slope of the hills didn’t intimidate them, nor do they subdue the farmers of today. For centuries, men have laboured mightily to build horizontal stone walls on those hills to create level ground to plant their vines.
Thousands of dry stone walls — no mortar — are still there today. As you cruise past them sitting on your open-air balcony sipping a martini brought to you by your suite’s butler, you’ll marvel at the back-breaking ingenuity that turned these canyon walls into world-famous vineyards.
When you get off the vessel you’ll also marvel at the capabilities of the bus drivers Scenic uses for excursions to unique villages or monastery wine cells high in the mountains. They calmly drive luxury highway-class buses on narrow ancient roads that make hairpin turns to climb mountainsides, while passengers gasp looking out of their windows.
The Portuguese government started building another dam on a tributary to the Douro, but early construction uncovered prehistoric rock art carved into the walls of the Cao Valley up to 25,000 years ago.
The dam was cancelled and further investigation led to the creation of the world’s largest prehistoric art gallery. The Archaeological Park of the Côa Valley is 26 kilometres long, but you don’t have to hike the valley to see the artwork of the ancient dwellers.
A spectacular museum designed to look like a cave tells the whole story and displays many replicas of the artwork.