Alto Douro Wine Region

In the Alto Douro the river runs through a deep, sinuous valley in the northeast of Portugal, and almost every slope above it has been carved into terraces of vines. The hillsides are made of schist, a dark, flaky rock that splits easily and holds the summer heat, and over the centuries people broke it by hand into soil and stacked the rest into walls. The result is a landscape in which the contour lines of the hills are drawn in stone and green, ridge after ridge, from the river up to the skyline, with white quintas, chapels and villages set among the vineyards.

Wine has been made here for nearly two thousand years, but the shape of the region was fixed in modern times by trade. On 10 September 1756 a royal Portuguese charter drew the boundaries of the vineyards allowed to produce port, making the Douro the first wine region in the world to receive a formal demarcation. The terraces themselves record the history of the trade. The oldest are the socalcos, narrow and irregular steps held up by schist walls, wide enough for only one or two rows of vines. Later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries wider terraces were laid out, so that a single hillside can show several generations of vineyard building side by side.

UNESCO inscribed the Alto Douro Wine Region in 2001, covering about 24,600 hectares of the wider demarcated area, which divides into three parts: the cooler Baixo Corgo downstream, the Cima Corgo around Pinhão at its heart, and the hot, dry Douro Superior towards the Spanish border. Touriga Nacional, Tinta Roriz and Tinta Barroca are among the principal black grapes, and the valley now makes as much unfortified table wine as port. The Douro railway line, which follows the river for much of its course, carried the wine trade and opens some of the best views of the terraces from its windows.

Getting there

The heritage area lies in the Douro valley around Peso da Régua and Pinhão, about 21 km from Vila Real Airport (VRL), a small regional airfield; most visitors arrive through Porto, at the mouth of the river. Trains on the Douro Line run upriver from Porto along the valley, and river cruises and quintas along the banks receive visitors.