We were driving south on Route 101 — a two-lane highway that slices diagonally through Portugal — in search of a tiny town called Mesão Frio and the Pousada Solar da Rede, an 18th-century manor house set above the Douro River. I had two maps spread out beside me, and a Spain-Portugal Michelin atlas open to the northern half of Portugal. How hard could it be to find the Douro? And where were we exactly? Lost somewhere, apparently in a nature preserve. “Don't take the high-speed road,” a confident receptionist at the Pousada de Amares, where we'd stayed the night before, had assured us. “Route 101 is faster.” But one map showed Mesão Frio to the east, and the other to the west. “Just pick a direction!” urged my exasperated traveling companion as we hit what seemed to be our 40th unlabeled roundabout.
And then, suddenly, the pousada appeared — a mansion, Baroque and huge — after switchbacks and turns, looming high above the green Douro (finally!) about two hours upriver from Porto. It was an impressive sight: winged granite dragons guarding the path to the front door and a terraced, formal labyrinthine garden jutting out over a vineyard; bushes carved in circles and squares, flowers blooming everywhere; and the lovely Douro meandering like a Hudson River School painting, hazy in the near distance.
Akin to the state-owned Spanish paradores, the 65-year-old network of Portuguese pousadas (once entirely state-run, but now managed by the Pestana hotel group) range from 18th-century manor houses, like the one we'd been looking for, to former convents, monasteries, castles and palaces, as well as more modern buildings tucked into nature preserves and mountain ranges. They are almost all a challenge to get to — during our four-day trip in May, everyone my partner, Ian, and I spoke to had gotten lost at least once on the narrow roads that wrap around lush mountainsides where auto-routes inexplicably change names.
But any irritation over maps that don't coincide and towns that don't exist melts upon arrival. These buildings are magnificent: the ones we visited were as, if not more, beautifully turned out, we thought, than their Spanish counterparts.
Later that night, comfortably fed and checked in, we were finally able to laugh about our “one-hour” trip to Mesão Frio, which took nearly triple the time promised by Google Maps. We even recounted the story to our new friends and fellow guests, Claudia Dannhorn and Bruno Brawand, as we sat on embroidered damask chairs beneath a big crystal chandelier. Claudia sprinted back to her room and came back with a portable Global Positioning System. “You have to have one,” she said. “In Portugal there are no signs anywhere.” She pulled her legs underneath her, struggling to get comfortable — a real feat on chairs designed for ballerina-straight 18th-century postures.
This had been the formal family sitting room for a noble wine-estate family; their bewigged images adorn the traditional blue-tiled walls of the dining room. As with other manor houses in this region, these wealthy estate owners were producers of Douro wines — whites, reds and Ports — with 62 acres of family vineyards, along with orange and lemon trees.
The next morning we saw the grape vines and the fruit trees clinging to the sheer mountainside, spilling down to the meandering Douro itself. But that night it was stormy and dark, and the room was bright. Casual it is not. The chairs and love seats are the kind only Marie Antoinette might have found comfy: intricately carved, carefully embroidered. Just sitting in such a room — with its original 18th-century tiles on the walls and gilt French mirrors, straight-backed chairs and period silks everywhere — we felt as though we'd stepped over the red-velvet rope and were chilling out at Versailles. On a stand, a crumbling text in Portuguese provided the history of this family estate turned pousada.
In a gorgeously photographed coffee table book on the pousadas called “Moradas de Sonho” (which was translated as “Dream Places”), the pousadas are explained as the “preservation of [Portugal's] architectural and natural heritage, living architecture and the riches of Portuguese cooking.”
Solar da Rede's dining room — where local specialties like cabbage soup and roasted duck with a caramelized cherry reduction are served alongside such recent innovations as vegetarian crepes — was impressive, with Portuguese tiles and period chandeliers. In an environment of relaxed luxury, pousadas provide a glimpse of Portuguese history and landscapes, well off the traditional traveler's path.
Claudia and Bruno are just the type of visitor that Portugal hopes to entice as guests. The couple (she's German, he's Swiss) own and run the Hotel Berghaus Bort in the Swiss Alps town of Grindelwald, and they work without a day's rest, they told us, from November until May. Then, instead of sleeping, they travel for three weeks. One year it was Thailand. This year they were hopping from one pousada to the next, in large part because so many of their employees are Portuguese, and they wanted to get a taste of the country. Claudia and Bruno's journey began at the 12th-century Castelo de Óbidos, the first pousada converted from a historic building. They'd slept in the tower. And then they'd moved on to the medieval city of Guimarães, the entire downtown of which is a Unesco World Heritage site.
IF you drive in any direction from Guimarães — to the northern and eastern borders with Spain, or out to the Atlantic coast — the countryside is rich in pousadas: mostly convents and monasteries, each reflecting the austerity and isolation of this region in the Middle Ages. Many had fallen into terrible disrepair before adoption and rehabilitation by the pousada system. But the state of ruin, rather than complicating the restorations, allowed architects license for artistry, turning these buildings into places of the imagination as much as history.
Perhaps the best example of this is Santa Maria do Bouro, a monastery turned pousada just outside Amares, about 22 miles north of Guimarães. There I ran into J. Kasmin, a London-based retired art dealer, at the Pousada de Amares. Mr. Kasmin and his friend Peter Brock walked to the pousada, literally, at the end of a walking tour with On Foot Holidays— seven days of hiking in the Portuguese countryside. For the two, the effect of seeing the pousada through the mist was similar to that of the pilgrims who visited this monastery in the 14th century — that is, until the latter-day pilgrims stepped inside and found ancient walls transformed by modern art and design.
In the late 1980s Santa Maria do Bouro, a half-destroyed 12th-century monastery, was handed over to the Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura. He spent eight years on the restoration; the pousada was inaugurated in 1997.
The architect noted as he worked, “I am not restoring a monastery; I am building a pousada from the stones of a monastery.” The internal courtyard was left nearly a ruin, with trees growing from the rock and arches leading nowhere, visible through giant nonreflective glass windows along every corridor. Yet the rooms, once monks' cells, are modern and sleek, with all-white marble bathrooms. In the hallways, an oxidized iron ceiling hides air-conditioning and modern plumbing. Big windows have a view of a chapel attached to the monastery, seamlessly blending the old and new.
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