Portugal’s economic pain is your gain in Porto, one of Western
Europe’s great bargains. New boutique hotels and restaurants, like the Yeatman,
dramatically perched above the Douro River featuring Porto’s first
Michelin-starred restaurant,
have brought a fresh burnish to
this
Unesco-protected city where labyrinthine narrow streets, ancient
buildings
and black-cloaked students inspired a young English tutor who
lived here in the early 1990s named J. K. Rowling.
The financial
downturn doesn’t detract from the town’s most prominent industry -port
wine- which can be sampled in the cellars of Sandeman, Graham’s or
Taylor-Fladgate with a terraced restaurant
, on the Douro’s south bank.
