Porto built its reputation on fortified wine, but Portugal's northern gateway is earning a second literary identity. At the centre of it is Livraria Lello, the 1906 bookshop with a sweeping red staircase and stained-glass ceiling that is often called the world's most beautiful. Locals like to say its staircase helped inspire Hogwarts — a nice piece of lore given that one-time Porto resident J.K. Rowling lived nearby — and last year Dua Lipa added her own chapter, opening The Manifesto Library inside the shop's new cultural auditorium, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Álvaro Siza Vieira.
Since the Pedro Pinto family bought the bookshop in 2015, they've turned the selfie crowds into readers: an entry fee, redeemable against a book purchase, has lifted the share of visitors buying one from 10 per cent to 80 per cent. In August this year alone, the shop sold 120,000 books.
The wider city has caught the bug. In late June, the six-day BABELL festival, run by the Livraria Lello Foundation, pulled huge crowds into Porto's squares to hear Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, Olga Tokarczuk, Dulce Maria Cardoso and Salman Rushdie. Tickets weren't sold as tickets at all — you bought a book with a voucher inside, channelling business to 49 participating bookshops across the city. The festival is expected back in 2027.
Travellers can plug into the scene year-round. Hotel Forte de Gaia runs a literary walking tour past author-named streets, old cafés and the quirky Timtim Por Timtim comic-book shop. Torel Palace Porto, a literary-themed hotel since 2020, organises tours of second-hand and antiquarian bookstores (the Alfarrabistas Tour), hosts book clubs and poetry readings, and its Michelin-starred restaurant Blind nods to Nobel laureate José Saramago's novel about blindness — you can sleep it off in the Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen room or the Almeida Garrett suite.
The wine hasn't gone anywhere; it has simply been given a reading list. The Wine & Books hotel group, with properties in Lisbon, Porto and the Algarve, pairs bottles with books, and Sogrape's Joana Pais holds "book tastings" — wine-and-literature pairings — in the Manifesto Library. That space, a permanent collection of books about power, censorship and silence, currently hosts Ai Weiwei's A4 Exhibition, over 200,000 blank sheets of recycled paper, on show until June 2027.
For anyone who has already ticked off the port lodges along the Douro, this gives Porto a whole second itinerary — one where the cellar becomes a library and the pairing is prose and a glass. Come for the wine, stay for the shelves.
