30 Port anD the Douro
Spanish border in 1887, it had become a lifeline for the remote communities of the Alto
Douro, cutting the journey time to Oporto from days to hours. The small steam train
became known to all as the paciência, such was the need for patience with its frequent stops
for loading and unloading. But anyone who has visited the Douro will appreciate that the
railway, following the river for most of its course, is a considerable feat of engineering. Its
construction during the years of the phylloxera crisis must have helped to alleviate some of
the suffering among the local populace. In fact, one of its first major uses was to deliver large
quantities of copper sulphate and carbon disulphide, heavily subsidised by the government,
in an attempt to control oidium and phylloxera.
In spite of the obvious benefits, the railway had its detractors. Writing ten years after
its completion, Charles Sellers complains that the ‘steam horse has not added to the
beautiful though wild scenery of Tráz-os-Montes’ (the archaic spelling), adding that it has
‘diminished the number of picturesque flotillas of wine boats so familiar to all those who
know the region’. Nevertheless, the long Viking-inspired boats known as barcos rabelos
continued to ply the Douro until as late as the 1960s. Screeching bullock carts brought
the wine down from the quintas, many of which maintained their own riverside quays.
Some of the larger barcos rabelos could ship as many as seventy or eighty pipes of wine at a
time. Ropes were used to drag them on board and the pipes were stacked three high. The
journey by boat was hazardous in the extreme.
Depending on the flow of the river, a fully laden barco rabelo would take about two
days to travel downstream from Pinhão to the quayside at Gaia. During the voyage, the
crew would converse to each other in song, improvising their own chant as they went
along. This would occasionally be interrupted by a yell as they approached some rapids.
The helmsman, standing on a high poop above the main deck, would grip the tiller
and look ahead for half-submerged rocks while the remainder of the crew sounded the
bottom of the river with long poles. The hardest task of all was the return journey to the
vineyards, ascending the river with a boatload of empty pipes. This could take anything
between eight and fifteen days, with navigation completely impossible during the winter
floods. Making use of the Atlantic westerlies which funnel upstream, the mast would be
raised and a square sail allowed to billow forth. Oxen were tethered to the boat to drag it
up through the rapids. Some barcos rabelos have survived, powered incongruously by little
outboard motors while the skeletons of others can be found rotting on the river bank. A
small fleet of barcos rabelos has been mothballed and moored alongside the quay at Vila
Novade Gaia. Once a year they set sail in a good-humoured race to celebrate the feast day
of Oporto’s patron saint, São João.
Apart from making the region more accessible, the construction of the railway had a
significant and lasting impact on settlement patterns in the Douro valley. Until its arrival in
the late 1870s, nearly all the established towns and villages were located well above the river,
away from disease-carrying insects and the stifling summer heat. But with railway stations
at Régua and at the mouth of the Pinhão river, these places gradually became important
service centres in their own right. Although the railway had not yet reached Pinhão when he
visited, Henry Vizetelly provides the first detailed description of the place: