São Bento railway station

Most people come to São Bento without a train to catch. The station's entrance hall is one of the great tiled rooms of Portugal: some 20,000 azulejos, covering about 551 square metres of wall, painted by Jorge Colaço between 1905 and 1916 and made at the Sacavém factory. Colaço laid the first tile on 13 August 1905, and the work took eleven years. The big set pieces are done in blue on white, the classic Portuguese manner, while a band of polychrome tiles runs around the top of the hall like a picture book, tracing the ways people travelled in different corners of Portugal.

The blue murals tell the country's founding stories at monumental scale. On one wall knights clash at the Battle of Valdevez in 1140, and below them the loyal Egas Moniz offers his own life, and those of his wife and sons, to Alfonso VII of León after the siege of Guimarães. Opposite, John I rides into Porto with Philippa of Lancaster for their wedding in 1387, and Prince Henry leads the conquest of Ceuta in 1415. The wall towards the platforms turns from history to everyday life in the north: the pilgrimage to Our Lady of the Remedies at Lamego, a cattle fair, and four panels of work in the Douro valley, from tending vines and the harvest to the wine going downriver by boat. Small Art Deco allegories of time and signalling sit on the pilasters by the doors.

The building around the tiles belongs to the Beaux-Arts world of Paris. It was designed by the Porto architect José Marques da Silva as a symmetrical U-shaped block of granite facing Praça Almeida Garrett, and it stands on the site of the Benedictine convent of São Bento da Avé Maria, founded by King Manuel I in 1518 and demolished in 1892 after its last nun died. Trains were already running into the site through a newly cut tunnel in 1896, before the station building existed; King Carlos I laid the foundation stone in 1900, construction proper began in 1904, and the city removed Marques da Silva from the job in 1909 amid delays.

São Bento is still a working terminus. Suburban trains leave for Braga, Guimarães, Aveiro and Marco de Canaveses, and it is the western end of the Douro line that follows the river up to Pocinho through the wine country pictured on the walls. The station sits inside the historic centre of Porto, a World Heritage city of steep granite streets tumbling down to the Douro, and its forecourt looks straight into it.

Getting there

The station is in the centre of Porto, on Praça Almeida Garrett, and is connected underground to the São Bento stop on metro line D. Francisco de Sá Carneiro Airport (OPO) is about 13 km away of the city centre. Long-distance trains from Lisbon stop at Porto-Campanhã, from where local trains run on to São Bento.