Wine Quay Bar, Porto

The photos on this page were taken during a long session at the Wine Quay Bar in Porto, Portugal, back in 2017. I was on a short break there with my wife, Polly. It was a long session mainly because we really liked the bar, but also because Polly had badly hurt her Achilles Tendon earlier that day and was having difficulty walking (more about this later). We drank more than two bottles of wine (I can’t remember how many, that’s the problem with alcohol) and ate lots of excellent food. We spent well over a hundred Euros, but we were there for over four hours as I remember. Well worth the money.

We went there on my sister Alison’s recommendation. She came across the bar during a visit to Porto a year or so earlier. She was impressed because they helped her choose her wines. They helped us as well; we found this very useful for finding interesting Portuguese wines, red of course.

We were lucky as we were able to sit outside using a wall as a table. The views were excellent. We spent hours watching people wandering up and down the quay side, below us. Watching the boats on the river. Eating lots of food to soak up the alcohol.

When we ordered our first snack it came with a water pistol. This really confused us, why? Well, there were lots of seagulls around and they would swoop in to steal your food. The water pistol is to scare them away. While we were sitting there a seagull swooped in and grabbed some food from the hand of someone sitting right next to us. She said one second she had to some food in her hand, the next second it was gone! We watched the seagull eat the food on the roof of a building below us.

On the wall where we were sitting, there was a model owl. Why it was there has been lost in the mists of time. It was probably there to scare the seagulls away.

Keen eyed amongst you will notice a large collection of corks to the left of the owl in the photo below. It’s not an indication of how much wine we drank; it’s an ash tray!

It seems the Wine Quay has two rooms and an apartment to let, a bit noisy for me. But it looks like an excellent place to stay if you like being near the action. Details on their website.

The photo on my previous post shows the quayside from the bridge. The bar is somewhere along there.

During the trip Polly badly hurt her Achilles Tendon, which had only just recovered from being hurt in Essen, Germany a month or so earlier. I wasn’t with her when it happened and I wasn’t carrying a phone (nowadays I do), so she couldn’t tell me she’d hurt herself. I’d gone off to buy a large bottle of Olive Oil we’d seen in a shop the day before. It looked like it was a real bargain, it wasn’t, it was light Olive Oil used for making mayo. A wasted trip. I’d left Polly sitting in a bar just round the corner from the Wine Quay, which wasn’t due to open for an hour or so. I was going to meet her in the Wine Quay when it opened. She hurt herself moving from that bar to the Quay. Luckily, she made it and managed to bag seats on the wall.