Portugal

Fado is Portugal's national music — a genre of saudade (longing, melancholy, and beauty compressed into a single untranslatable word) that emerged from the Alfama and Mouraria neighbourhoods of Lisbon in the 19th century. At its finest, it is performed in a tasca of 12 seats, by one singer and one or two guitarists, in a room so small that the performance is physically intimate. The Portuguese guitar — a twelve-string instrument specific to fado — produces a sound that is completely unlike anything else in European music.

The experience of hearing fado in a tiny Alfama tasca for the first time — the silence before the singer begins, the way the room stops completely, the emotional power of a voice expressing something in Portuguese that you don't understand but feel entirely — is one of the most affecting musical experiences available anywhere in Europe. Book a table at a proper tasca rather than a tourist restaurant: smaller, fewer seats, and the music is the point rather than the food.

The Tagus at sunset is one of the finest urban waterway experiences in Europe — the river widens here almost to a sea, and from the water the whole of Lisbon's hillside silhouette is visible at once: São Jorge Castle, the Alfama climbing toward it, the white dome of Panteão Nacional, the 25 de Abril Bridge (a dead ringer for the Golden Gate) spanning the river with the Cristo Rei statue behind it, and the Belém Tower standing in the water. The golden light turns everything amber.

A two-hour sunset sailing tour covers the full panorama from the water. Most boats offer wine and local snacks on board. Departure is typically from Belém, heading upriver as the light drops. The combination of the city skyline, the bridge, and the water at golden hour is one of those views that makes the particular quality of Lisbon light — renowned among painters and photographers — immediately understandable.

Cross the lower deck of the Dom Luís I Bridge on foot to Vila Nova de Gaia — the town directly opposite Porto where the great port wine houses have stored their barrels since the 17th century. The lodges of Graham's, Taylor's, Sandeman, Quinta do Crasto, and a dozen others line the south bank of the Douro, their barrels stacked in cellars that smell of oak and alcohol and cool stone. A guided cellar tour takes you through the production process — from the vineyards of the Douro Valley to the aging barrels — and ends with a tasting of aged tawny, ruby, and vintage ports poured from the bottle.

The best tours include 4–6 ports across different styles and ages. A 20-year tawny tastes like Christmas and caramel and dried fruit and time. A vintage port from a great house in a great year tastes like something that no other wine-producing region on Earth replicates. Drink it looking back across the Douro at Porto's stacked pastel houses rising from the riverbank — one of the great city views in Europe.

The Azores sit in the deep Atlantic at the junction of three tectonic plates — an underwater topography that produces extraordinary marine life year-round. Resident pods of common and bottlenose dolphins live permanently in the waters around São Miguel, and swimming with them — in the open Atlantic, not a pool or a bay — is a completely different experience from any captive or managed dolphin encounter. The dolphins approach you, interact on their own terms, and leave when they want to. The water is deep and clear and the ocean around you is genuinely vast.

Sperm whales migrate through Azorean waters from April to October — the boats use a combination of vigia (traditional lookout posts on the cliffs) and hydrophone to locate them. Blue whales, fin whales, sei whales, and pilot whales are all regularly encountered. A half-day dolphin swim tour goes out by boat to locate the pods and enters the water with them; a whale watching tour covers the deeper waters offshore where the cetaceans feed.

Furnas is a volcanic valley on the eastern end of São Miguel where the earth is actively simmering — fumaroles vent sulphurous steam from cracks in the ground, boiling mud pools sit beside the road, and geothermal heat warms the soil to the point where the famous cozido das Furnas (a slow-cooked meat stew) is buried underground in pots and cooked by volcanic heat for six hours. The hot springs at Terra Nostra Park sit in a lush botanical garden around a large thermal pool of orange-brown mineral water heated to around 40°C.

Soaking in a geothermal pool in a garden of tree ferns and century-old camellias, with steam rising from the ground around you, is completely specific to the Azores. The Poca da Beija outdoor hot springs, set in a series of terraced pools in the forest above Furnas, offer a wilder and more atmospheric version at lower cost. Both are unmissable on any São Miguel itinerary.