34 Port anD the Douro
oPorto at the enD oF the
nineteenth Century
The new wealth in Oporto was much more conspicuous. The same British wine merchant
who had compared the phylloxera crisis to the Irish potato famine visited Oporto in 1874
and wrote that arriving by sea is a ‘positive danger, for the entrance [to the Douro] is at best
no more than 150 yards wide, is very shallow and the tide tears in at a tremendous rate
while the course is continually changing by shifting sand’. He goes on to describe the city
of Oporto itself with its ‘crooked, rugged narrow streets’, adding ‘how the horses got along
and how the springs stood the jolting is a mystery. Up as well as down hill the hardy beasts
galloped to the tune of a cowhide whip played in a manner that would flay the skin of horses
at home: while wheels rattled over boulders planted where they were for generations’.
By the end of the century much of this had changed. Charles Sellers considers how ‘Oporto
has very much improved during the last forty years.’ A new seaport was built on the coast 8
kilometres to the north-east at Leixões and a system of tram lines extended around the city
although ‘the Rua dos Inglezes was one of the very few streets paved right through’. (In 1893
it was renamed the Rua Infante D. Henrique.) The Ponte Dom Luíz, the impressive two-tier
bridge linking Oporto with Vila Nova de Gaia, was opened in September 1886.
Life for the British community also continued to improve for, as Sellers recounts in
his ‘personal reminiscences’, many of the shippers had built houses on the coast at Foz do
Douro or Leça da Palmeira where they spent the summer months, taking their furniture
with them. They frequented a beach at Foz which became known as the Praia dos Inglezes
(English Beach – a name which survives today), although police regulations stipulated
that all bathers in public places must be ‘completely clad as if going for a walk’. Bathing
gradually became fashionable among the Portuguese. In order to encourage the inhabitants
of the city to wash more regularly, the Portuguese clergy declared that everyone should
have taken at least thirty-three baths by 24 August, St Bartholomew’s Day. Needless to
say, many people assembled at the new seaside resorts to take all the prescribed baths on
the same day!
Still keeping a distance from the Portuguese, the British maintained their national
sporting traditions. Cricket had been played in Oporto for as long as anyone could
remember and the shippers had their own cricket field and clubhouse near the Palácio
das Carrancas where they assembled on Saturday afternoons. One of the most important
social events at the time was the annual cricket match between the teams of Mr W. R.
Teage and Mr H. Murat, both prominent Port shippers, which invariably ended with a
dinner at the Factory House. At one stage in the late nineteenth century the British also
had their own pack of foot beagles for hunting hare which, according to one visitor, ‘had
turned out well, and was at the time maintained in good style’. Horse racing and fox
hunting had been tried according to Sellers but ‘the turf was a dead letter to them [the
Portuguese] as was hunting’.
Across the river in Gaia a minor industrial revolution was underway. Although
generally conservative in their approach to change, Port shippers built new lodges to