🇵🇹 Portugal
Porto
Porto (population 237,000 in the city, 1.7 million in the Porto Metropolitan Area — the second largest city of Portugal and the city that gave Portugal its name (Portus Cale — the Roman name for the port on the Douro River mouth, from which "Portugal" derives)) is built on granite hills dropping steeply to the Douro River, creating one of the most dramatically beautiful urban landscapes in Europe: the Ribeira district (the UNESCO World Heritage medieval waterfront with its stacked, azulejo-tiled townhouses), the Porto wine lodges of Vila Nova de Gaia on the south bank (the caves where the tawny and ruby Port wines age in oak barrels for 10, 20, 30 and 40 years), and the bridges over the Douro (the Ponte Dom Luís I (1886, Gustave Eiffel's colleague Théophile Seyrig — with a double-decker iron arch that carries road traffic on the lower level and the Metro on the upper level). Porto is also the home of one of the world's great bookshops (Livraria Lello — the 1906 neo-Gothic bookshop with the carved wooden staircase said to have inspired J.K. Rowling's Hogwarts), the birthplace of the francesinha (the Porto sandwich: bread, ham, fresh sausage, steak and linguiça, covered in melted cheese and drowned in a thick spiced tomato-and-beer sauce — the most extreme and distinctly Portuguese sandwich in existence), and the center of the most distinctive tile art tradition in Europe (the azulejos — the hand-painted tin-glazed ceramic tiles covering the facades of churches, stations and houses in Porto in a uniquely northern Portuguese way).