Day 2. Douro Valley – a road among vineyards

From Porto, I set off towards the Douro Valley. And here the car really turned out to be the best solution, because the road itself has become a separate part of the journey. The further away I got from Porto, the fewer cities there became, and hills, vineyards, and small villages appeared around, where life seemed to be unaware of the existence of the word "rush" at all.

Dora

I stopped several times simply because I couldn't get past another beautiful view. At some point, I already began to suspect that I would not get to the next point on the route today at all, because every ten minutes there was a new reason to park and get out of the car. The navigator, by the way, was completely ruthless in this regard: he continued to show the arrival time, as if he did not see that I had stopped photographing the mountains for the twentieth time.

In Douro, for the first time, I felt the real scale of Portugal. It was no longer just a trip between cities, but a journey through a country where the landscape is constantly changing outside the window, and the road itself becomes part of the experience.