OPORTO

I fancy that every strange town, coming to the traveller’s eyes for the first time, creates within him some effect for which he was not at all prepared by any part of his reading. There is always something about it (to him, at least, an overwhelming characteristic) which had not been expressed in any one of the general descriptions. This is not, I suppose, because the various places too well known in European travel do not affect others as they affect oneself, but rather that print creates a habit of ceaseless repetition upon one model.

Now Oporto has in my eyes, since I have seen it, such a characteristic which I had not noticed in any description of the many I had come across; a characteristic which struck me with violence the first time I set eyes on it. It is this: that it lies in the depths of a chasm.

BEYOND THE BEND.

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The port is on a mountain river, deep down between two banks which fall towards it so steeply as to make a gorge rather than a valley. I know of only one other place where a port of some size has such a situation, and that is Newcastle-upon-Tyne: but though Newcastle also gives this effect of a gorge or trench (and the height of its bridge above the river has thus impressed every etcher and painter of it), the effect is nothing like so strong as it is at Oporto. One wonders, as one comes in from the south, how such a confined waterway ever came to be used from the outer sea, and it is only when one gets down towards the level of it that one appreciates its width.

Oporto is only one more example of those land gates from the sea which, having struck root under older and simpler conditions of smaller ships and of lesser human gatherings, continue, by the necessity of their inheritance, a rôle which they would not fulfil had they to begin their service to-day. Oporto must have begun in the old Roman times, or even before then, as some small cluster of little warehouses and shippers’ exchanges upon the narrow shelf of its river bank; not yet climbing up the very steep bank behind, and dealing only with few vessels of small draught and of light burden.

It could have had no great trade before the discovery of land in and beyond the Atlantic. It had no highly specialised function to support before the development of the English wine trade during the last two and a half centuries. The modern world has compelled its partial abandonment. The larger ships have to make land at Leixões, an artificial harbour built out upon the Atlantic coast, north of the river mouth, and exposed to the south-westerly winds. Yet the ancient function of the town itself as a port has survived: just as London, made by London Bridge, has to accommodate its main shipping far down the river, but keeps its commercial centre on the old sites north of the Pool.

The Douro valley carries this character of a gorge or trench eastward for some days’ journey inland: as men see who go up on foot, or in a boat against the stream, until they come to the Spanish frontier.

Of all the great Spanish rivers, which fall from the high tablelands on to the sea plain, this one, the Douro, is the most rapid, turbulent and mountainous; and the soil through which it cuts, the earth which nourishes those famous vineyards (a small and narrow patch of golden land), is friable, sawn away by the violence of the water, as is soft wood by steel. Hence the ravine before the mouth of which, and upon the steep banks of which, the town stands.

Oporto has grown out to surmount two hills with something of a subsidiary valley between. It is marked everywhere by the activity which the English trade has given it. From this has it derived its wealth. This is its meaning in the political geography of Europe.

Everywhere the impress of England is discoverable. The memorable ford where Wellington crossed; the famous ‘Factory,’ which is the noble old stone house of the English wine merchants; the great English names of the trade—all these are marks of Oporto.

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There is about this strong link between England and a distant foreign town something exceptional which you will not find anywhere else in Europe; yet there is no impress of English art or English thought upon the place such as you may discover in French districts where, during the later Middle Ages, the English crown had direct rule. There are pieces of church architecture in Bordeaux which are distinctively English. Here and there in Normandy you will find characteristics of fifteenth-century England left by the passage of Henry V., and by the minority of his son. Bayonne cathedral might be known for a relic of the old Plantagenet connection even though we had lost all record of its building. But Oporto, save for the factory, which is strong eighteenth-century English, has not such architectural marks: and it is singular that this should be so.

They told me in the course of my visit that in the old records of the place, and in diaries and letters of Englishmen before the days of steamships, there is perpetual reference to the ‘Bar’—and no wonder! The Bar of the Douro is one of the most remarkable things I have seen. It is not merely silted up with a great expanse of sand which almost forbids entry—that is common to scores and hundreds of rivers. It is not merely that this great bar shifts, as do such bars in such places, exposed to great storms from the Atlantic. It is rather that immediately _within_ the fairway, just after a boat has made good its entry into quiet water, you still find unexpected rocks menacing the way, and considerable patches of shifting sand.

The site of the place (two thousand yards below the wharves of the town) emphasises that truth about Oporto which the eyes grasp from the first moment of seeing its profound valley—that it was originally a little dangerous haven, hardly to be entered from the sea, uncertain, not to be used on a large scale, yet turned at last by the activity of man into a place far beyond its powers. Oporto is an excellent proof of the truth that if physical geography moulds history on its largest lines, yet, in all the passing developments of history, it is man that turns nature to his use rather than nature controls man. The huge iron bridge (of English design and construction) spanning the whole gorge at so vast a height, the unnatural climbing up of the houses from height to height, the exiguous stream, its violence, its difficult entry, the necessity for a new modern port wholly of man’s provision, are all witnesses to that same dominance of man’s will over earth.

To face page 66.]

When the Northerners began fighting their way down, pushing the Mohammedans southwards, this little Roman place being called essentially ‘The Port’ (its name is Porto, and it is an error that we should have called it ‘Oporto,’ _the_ Port) gave its name to all that followed. It was the ‘Porto Calle’; it created the general name of ‘Portugal.’

_Part III_

_The Recovered Country_