Lusitania Legacy

The stops

1. 1 Tour · Price: moderate Évora: Temple of Diana Portugal's best-preserved Roman city with the Temple of Diana standing proud. The medieval center grew around Roman foundations. Wine bars in the UNESCO old town serve excellent Alentejo wines.
2. 2 Tour · Price: moderate Herdade do Esporão Estate Modern estate on land with Roman archaeological finds. The winery combines cutting-edge winemaking with 2,000 years of history. Restaurant, art collection, and extensive vineyards on the sun-baked Alentejo plains.
3. 3 Tour · Price: low Conímbriga Roman Ruins Portugal's largest Roman site with stunning mosaics and evidence of wine production. The House of Fountains has remarkably preserved floor mosaics. Wine would have flowed at the banquets depicted.
4. 4 Tasting · Price: moderate Dão Region Granite Terroir Granite terroir Romans recognized for distinctive wines. Touriga Nacional thrives on these ancient soils. The wines are Portugal's most elegant reds — Burgundian in style, Portuguese in soul.
5. 5 Tour · Price: moderate Port Wine Lodges of Gaia Romans shipped wine down the Douro to Portus Cale (Porto). Port wine developed later but on Roman trade routes. The lodges across the river from Porto age wine in centuries-old cellars.
6. 6 Adventure · Price: high Douro Valley River Cruise The last rabelo wine boat made its final commercial run in 1971 — ending a river trade the Romans started two millennia ago. Master boatman Senhor Domingos still remembers loading 50 Port barrels at dawn. Today you board at Pinhao, the tiny station where 3,047 hand-painted azulejo tiles tell the whole story before you even reach the water. The cruise threads through UNESCO terraces so steep they look engineered by maniacs — because they were, by hand, after phylloxera destroyed everything in the 1860s and locals rebuilt every wall. At Quinta do Bomfim (2024 Global Best of Wine Tourism winner), fifth-generation Symington winemakers still foot-tread grapes in granite lagares each September. And somewhere along the schist hillsides, one of 106 surviving granite pillars from 1756 — when Pombal created the world's first wine boundary — still marks the spot where modern wine regulation began.
7. 7 Tasting · Price: moderate Quinta do Vallado: The Ferreira Quinta on the Corgo On 12 May 1861 a boat carrying Dona Antónia Adelaide Ferreira and Baron Forrester was wrecked at the Cachão da Valeira, up the Douro. Forrester drowned; the story goes that the women's crinolines kept them afloat. Quinta do Vallado, on the Corgo by Peso da Régua, was bought in 1818 by her uncle and father-in-law, the house says, and her descendants run it. You can trace the wreck from the Casa da Companhia in Régua, tour the winery, taste wine from a plot planted in 1929 and, at a price, the Adelaide, named for her.
8. 8 Tour · Price: low Peso da Régua Wine Museum The Douro Museum traces viticulture from Romans to today. See the original demarcation stones from 1756 — the world's first wine appellation, predating Bordeaux by a century.
9. 9 Tour · Price: moderate Coimbra University & Wine Every night for 250 years, staff at the Joanine Library have draped leather sheets over the tables. Not to protect them from students — to protect them from the colony of bats living in the Baroque ceiling. The bats are pest control: they eat the insects that would destroy 70,000 irreplaceable books. King Dinis I founded this university in 1290. Students still wear black capes and still rip them at graduation — a 700-year-old ritual called the rasganço. Time your visit for Queima das Fitas in May: 4,000 caped students singing fado at midnight outside the 12th-century cathedral. No wine region on earth has a better soundtrack.
10. 10 Tasting · Price: moderate Bairrada Sparkling & Red Wines Underrated region with Roman wine heritage. Baga grape produces both serious reds and excellent sparkling wines. The suckling pig (leitão) paired with local wine is a pilgrimage in itself.

The story

Plan the trip

Insider tip The Douro Valley is the crown jewel. Stay overnight at a quinta for the full experience — sunrise over the terraced vineyards is unforgettable. The terraces were ancient when the first quintas were built 300 years ago.

More trails in this chapter

• Tarraconensis Trail
• Baetica Wine Road
• Emerita Augusta