Porto's literary renaissance: the famous European wine city swapping decanters for 'book tastings'

Porto, in Portugal’s cooler, greener north, has long been associated with the fortified wine that took its name from there, where it was stored and aged in port lodges along the Douro River, becoming the dominant tipple of the British upper classes in the 18th century. But whilst decanters are still today, being passed clockwise on the dining tables of grand houses in Britain and Portugal alike, the chatter about the city on the lips of the imbibers is as likely to be about its vibrant literary scene as its famous liquid gold.

Just as port is an integral part of the shared history between England and Portugal (whose diplomatic alliance signed in 1373 is the world’s oldest enduring one), there are also plenty of English threads woven through Porto’s rapidly evolving literary status.

With port, it began when British merchants added brandy to Portuguese red wine to fortify it for its long sea journey home. Then England boycotted French wines and, with the Methuen Treaty of 1703, lowered duties on Portuguese wine, resulting in port rapidly taking over the market. With literature, it centres on a bookshop, whose staircase was allegedly key in the inspiration for one-time Porto resident J.K. Rowling in her creation of Hogwarts. The same bookshop where, last year, London-born Dua Lipa opened The Manifesto Library.

Livraria Lello, the bookshop in question, opened in 1906. Now 120 years old, it has this year officially become Livraria Lello Porto and taken on an important cultural role within the city. Considered one of the world’s most beautiful bookshops with its neo-Gothic interiors, sweeping, red-clad, central staircase and stained-glass ceiling, it was bought by the Pedro Pinto family in 2015, who not only wanted to support a local icon in their home city, but to use it to create cultural ripples across Porto’s granite streets. First off, they introduced a system which cleverly harnessed the endless stream of visitors coming to photograph ‘that’ staircase by charging a fee to enter the bookshop, which could be offset against the purchase of a book. Over the years, the number of visitors who have bought a book has moved from 10 per cent to 80 per cent. In August this year, they sold 120,000 books in one month. Reading has caught on.

In her speech to mark its 120th anniversary, Aurora Pedro Pinto, Chair of the Board of Directors of Livraria Lello Porto, reflected on the bookshop’s journey. “Founded in 1906, in a country marked by high levels of illiteracy, Livraria Lello was, from the very beginning, a radical gesture” she said. “To build a house of such beauty, symbolic ambition and architectural significance, dedicated to books, at a time when much of the population could not read, was an act of faith in the future. A profoundly literary act, believing that the word can transform a city, a country, a world.”

It might be 120 years later, but that transformation is now seeping into every corner of Porto. Contrary to the famous dictum about the country’s regional characteristics, “In Porto they work, in Braga they pray, in Coimbra they study and in Lisbon they play”, it seems that Porto is now downing tools in favour of picking up a book. Against this backdrop, it was no surprise that BABELL literary festival, an initiative from the Livraria Lello Foundation, was a resounding success. What was a surprise was the level of writers who came. For six days in late June, under a cloudless sky, people, including me and my daughter, gathered in squares, clutching books, to listen to Julien Barnes (highly amusing), Margaret Atwood (inspirational), Olga Tokarczuk (revealing), Dulce Maria Cardoso (impressive) and others (even Salman Rushdie gave a talk) in crowds which reached tens of thousands. There was laughter at times and at others, an audience so enraptured you could have heard a pin drop. But most of all there was a tangible feeling that books rule. Tickets were only available by buying a book which had a voucher inside it, boosting the business of the 49 bookshops, apart from Livraria Lello, who participated.

And the ripples keep spreading. Visitors to Porto staying at Hotel Forte de Gaia, Autograph Collection can now sign up for a literary walking tour of Porto. They will discover streets named after famous Portuguese authors, dip into ancient bookstores, like the quirky Timtim Por Timtim, dedicated to old comic books, and stop at cafés, where once the literati gathered.

Tours of local second-hand and antiquarian bookstores (the Alfarrabistas Tour) can also be organised at Torel Palace Porto, which was championing Portuguese literature back in 2020 when it opened as a literary-themed hotel. It holds regular book club sessions and poetry readings, and its Michelin-starred restaurant, Blind, pays homage to José Saramago, Portugal’s Nobel Prize winner for literature, who wrote a novel about blindness. Go and see their exquisite culinary take on that, and make a night of it by staying in the Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen room, one of the most important Portuguese poets of the 20th century and a Porto local; or in the Almeida Garrett suite, named after the great 19th-century romantic writer who was born here.

Just as restaurant Blind has drawn on literature for inspiration, so Portuguese group, Wine & Books hotels, with outposts in Lisbon, Porto and now the Algarve, have created pairing boxes, which Joana Saraiva, administrator of owning PBH Group, explained "seeks to establish a relationship between what is read and what is tasted."

Joana Pais from Sogrape, Portugal’s leading wine company, based in Porto, told me one of her favourite things to do was “book tastings”. She went on, “not just because they pair wine with books but because they bring different forms of culture into conversation”. Joana regularly holds book tastings in the Manifesto Library, which opened in June in what Dua Lipa described as a ‘dream partnership’ with Service95 Book Club, which she founded. A permanent library dedicated to books that challenge power, censorship and silence, it sits in Livraria Lello’s new cultural auditorium, designed by local Pritzker Prize-winning architect Álvaro Siza Vieira. One of its four floors is dedicated to contemporary culture. Here until June 2027 is Ai Weiwei’s A4 Exhibition, composed of more than 200,000 blank sheets of A4 paper, produced from recycled textile fibres in Portugal. A book of his father’s poetry, previously censored in China, will soon be published here.

There is hope that 2027 will see the return of the BABELL literary festival to the city, but one thing is certain: Porto is now as firmly on the map for readers of literature as lovers of wine.