4 Weeks Portugal to Spain by Rail & Road: The Complete Circuit

The circuit opens on a gorge. Porto tips its pastel houses down to the Douro and charges a tax in altitude on everything worth seeing, then pays it back in the view from the top — granite and azulejo above, the working quay below, the names of the port houses painted white on the dark roofs across the water in Vila Nova de Gaia. The first night set the tone: a table at the Guindalense Football Club, a members' bar perched over the Guindais steps with the whole gorge going gold below, a cold beer and grilled things and the river turning to pewter. After that the days had their shape — up through the lanes to the Torre dos Clérigos and the gilded vertigo of São Francisco, down to the Ribeira and across the Dom Luís bridge on foot, and a glass of port at the WOW quarter or a Gaia terrace to close each evening.

And the eating, which in Porto is half the argument. Confeitaria do Bolhão for a century-old pastelaria lunch; Cervejaria Gazela for the tiny spiced cachorrinhos Bourdain made famous; O Afonso on Rua da Torrinha for the francesinha, the city's monument in sandwich form, ham and sausage and steak drowned in cheese and beer sauce; and two dinners that bracketed the register, the homely Rogério do Redondo and the fine DOP of chef Rui Paula. Folded into the seven days were the trip's two big day trips out — north across the Minho to Santiago de Compostela, the end of the Camino, and east into the terraced vineyards of the Douro Valley that made the port in the first place. Porto charges the climb first, every time, and then hands over the river.

The circuit's second move was to break it. A bus that cost A$8.75 ran an hour and three-quarters east of Porto, off the motorway and up into the hills until the Tâmega appeared below in its green trench, and set the traveller down in a town that booked nothing in return. Mondim de Basto has no monument with a timed ticket — just granite and whitewash on the river's left bank, the great green shoulder of Monte Farinha with a white chapel pinned to its summit, and, the reason the three nights existed at all, the Viniculum wine festival filling the squares with trestle tables and vinho verde and the whole town out late in the warm dark. The traveller drank the local wine in the place it was grown, on exactly the same terms as everyone else: buy a glass, find a table, work out the grilled food by pointing.

There is a kind of travel that is really a checklist worn as an experience, and the great cities make it easy to fall into. Mondim is the argument against it, placed second on purpose, before Lisbon and Barcelona could train the traveller into completion-for-its-own-sake. Three nights at the simple Hostel Carvalho, a climb up the mountain for one of the widest views in northern Portugal, and the best night of the whole month came free, in a square full of strangers, precisely because nobody was trying to provide it.

A long bus south — five and a half hours down the spine of the country — and the register changed key. Lisbon is the capital of light and saudade, the untranslatable ache the fado singers spend their lives circling, a city of seven hills spilling toward the Tejo in pastel and azulejo with the yellow trams grinding up lanes too steep to walk. The traveller arrived to a Monday and went looking for sound: dinner and live fado at the tiny tiled A Tasca do Chico in the Bairro Alto, then a jazz night across town at O Bom, O Mau e O Vilão. The days climbed to the castle and ran out to the great monuments of Belém, where the caravels once left for the edge of the known world; the evenings found a thimble of cherry ginjinha at A Ginjinha by Rossio and serious tables at 100 Maneiras and chef José Avillez's Cantinho do Avillez, with a humble lunch at O Trevo in between.

Where Porto is granite and labour, Lisbon is light and longing. The last full day went up into the cloud-wrapped follies of Sintra — kitsch and sublime and refusing to choose — and the final dinner was given over to a proper fado house, the Clube de Fado, the voices doing to the room what the city does to the traveller. Then the steel-and-glass cavern of Oriente station in the morning, and the road turned south again for the coast.

Four hours by bus down to the Algarve, and the journey stopped climbing monuments and started swimming. Lagos sits among the golden cliffs of the south coast — the ochre sandstone stacks and sea-caves of Ponta da Piedade, the tucked cove of Praia do Camilo down a long wooden stair, the light still low and the sand still cool if the traveller got there before the boats. The register dropped to a holiday one: a hired bike along the cliff paths, sunset hunted from the headlands, the Atlantic doing the work the museums did further north. The guesthouse Caravela sat a street back from the marina, cheap and central, and the dinners were the unfussy pleasure of a beach town that takes its fish seriously — Don Sebastião, Restaurante dos Artistas, and a last night of small plates at Jukebox Tapas.

Every circuit needs a place to exhale, and Lagos was it — the southern hinge of the whole trip. Three nights of salt and grilled sardines and cold vinho verde, and then the route turned its back on the sea and pointed inland, east into the hot, empty heart of the country.

Another four hours east, and the circuit dried out. Évora is a walled town the colour of wheat and bone, held inside its old ramparts in the baking Alentejo, and it keeps two things at its centre that say everything about it. The Templo de Diana still stands its Roman columns against the sky after the better part of two thousand years. And the Capela dos Ossos — the Chapel of Bones — lines its walls with the skulls and femurs of some five thousand dead beneath a written warning that the bones inside are waiting for the bones of the reader. It is the trip's memento mori, delivered in a single short, hot, unhurried overnight. One dinner, at the old Alentejan Dom Joaquim, and a night in the Pousada de Juventude hostel for under a hundred dollars.

Évora is the threshold. It is still Portugal, but the country going past the bus window on the way out — cork oak, dust, distance — is already rehearsing Spain. The next stop lay across a border that does not announce itself.

There was no drama at the frontier. The bus simply continued, the road signs changed language, and three and a half hours out of Évora the traveller arrived in Cáceres — and the accommodation was a flat directly on the Plaza Mayor, number 35, the medieval old town opening straight off the doorstep. The ciudad monumental of Cáceres is so intact it has doubled for half the historical dramas in Europe: a walled huddle of palaces and towers in Extremadura, turned to gold by the low sun and then to amber by the lamps, with storks nesting on the battlements and not a modern thing in sight after dark. A single, excellent dinner at Mastropiero Gastrobar y Jardín, and the long slow circle of the old town under the swifts.

Cáceres is the hinge between the two countries, and it earns its one argument: that the line on the map is the least interesting thing about the crossing. Spain announces itself not with a flag but with a different stone, a deeper and harder light. From the amber town the circuit turned at last toward the centre — and for the first time, the road became a railway.

The steel serpent that runs from Cáceres climbs onto the high meseta in three and a half hours and sets the traveller down in Madrid, which is Spain with the sound turned all the way up. After the silence of the interior the capital roars. The first night was a pilgrimage of sorts — dinner at Sobrino de Botín, founded in 1725 and recognised as the oldest restaurant on earth, roast suckling pig in a wood oven that has not gone cold in three centuries. The next day belonged to the great galleries: the Prado's wall of Velázquez and Goya, and, at the Reina Sofía, Guernica, the painting that holds the century's wound in black and white and grey. To understand the joy of Madrid the traveller has to see the wound first; afterwards there was the steam and cold plunge of the Hammam al Andalus Arab baths, a stand-up lunch at the Mercado de San Miguel, and a late dinner at Taberna Elisa, the city carrying the evening well past any reasonable hour.

This is the loudest the circuit gets, set deliberately at its centre — the dry, high heart of the trip, the maximum of noise and art and appetite. And from the centre the only way left was down: east and down, off the plateau, to the sea.

A second steel serpent, under two hours from Madrid-Chamartín, dropped the traveller back at the Mediterranean in Valencia — the city that, when the Turia flooded it one last catastrophic time, did the unthinkable and diverted the river out of its own heart, then turned the dry bed into a nine-kilometre garden that curls through the middle of the city like a green moat, the traffic up on the banks and the cool down in the trench. The traveller walked the Turia end to end to Calatrava's white, bone-like City of Arts and Sciences, rising out of its shallow pools with the Oceanogràfic aquarium at its far end — the future grafted onto the disaster. Lunches came out of the Modernista iron-and-glass Mercado Colón; dinners ran from Karaki Gastro to the Meat Market to Restaurante les Tendes; and the paella, here in the city that invented it, was eaten where it should be — at midday, near the water, taken slowly.

Valencia is the city that rebuilt its worst day into its best idea, and four easy days of it readied the traveller for the end of the line — the busiest, most complete, most argumentative city of them all.

The last steel serpent ran three hours up the coast into Barcelona Sants, and the circuit ended where Iberia argues hardest with itself. Barcelona is the busiest and most complete of the cities, and its presiding genius left it an argument still unfinished in stone — the Sagrada Família, Gaudí's basilica a hundred and forty years in the building, a forest of branching columns reaching for a roof that was always more idea than ceiling — with Park Güell and Casa Batlló and the medieval dark of the Gothic Quarter pressed against the Eixample's grid to back it up. The traveller marked the arrival literally, with a tattoo booked weeks ahead from Peli at Grimm, then ate the city the way it asks to be eaten — standing up, small plates and vermut, at Quimet y Quimet and the Xarcuteria La Pineda, with proper dinners at Suculent and Eidest.

And from this last base the trip threw out its richest spray of day trips: the Dalí Theatre-Museum at Figueres with the Onyar houses of Girona, the Roman amphitheatre above the sea at Tarragona and the white town of Sitges, and the small, essential Colònia Güell crypt where Gaudí prototyped the whole impossible idea of the basilica. Seven days, six of them with something booked, and then a four-thirty taxi through the dark to the airport. Atlantic to Mediterranean, granite to amber to mosaic — the last and busiest city the proof of everything the first quiet ones argued.