Spending a Day in Vila Nova de Gaia

Across the Douro River from Porto, Portugal is Vila Nova de Gaia. A few days ago we walked over there after breakfast at the Majestic Cafe by crossing one of the pedestrian/train bridges over the river. There is an upper part of the town and a lower part of the town. We took the cable car/sky ride down, walked around and had lunch at an Italian restaurant. Then we walked around some more including going into a sardine shop – Portugal is known for their sardines and this colorful shop was covered in cans! And Casa Portuguesa which is a shop here that specializes in their cod cakes with sheep cheese. This shop was such a vibe with it’s wall full of antique books, cod cakes filled with cheese, and a guy playing an organ!

We, then, took the cable car back up to go to a private cooking class to learn how to make the infamous pastel de nata. I’m going to have a whole separate post for that this week so this is just a sneak peek. We then went back down and stumbled across a small little tapas place that is part of a distillery and got some quick bites before going back up to the park near the bridge to wait for sunset. There are always a lot of people at the park for the sunset view, but this night had even more people because they set up a screen by the bar at the park for the Portugal v. France game so there was a lot of fun energy going on! We started walking across the bridge as the sun was setting and it was beautiful! We also saw more people sitting outside in a grassy area watching the game as we crossed the bridge back to Porto.