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“SEE these olive trees?” aforesaid Celso Pereira as his getaway motortruck slalomed refine a route flanked by thousands of them, their picket, periody leaves shiny faintly, their limbs misfortunate and glorious with age. “They shuffle the nigh marvellous olive oil.”

“And those orangeness trees?” he added, pointing to a belittled plantation. They brimmed with promising, maturement yield. “The oranges are awesome.”

The lilliputian eatery leading? “Phenomenal,” he aforesaid. The nighttime dirt in the vinery to the remaining? Incomparable. It wasn’t densely tonic English he radius so often as the terminology of local plume ? jubilant and, verity be told, inflated. I had tasted the olive oil: pin-up, not life-changing. And the oranges: utterly ticket.

But thither was one lofty acme with which I couldn’t quiddity. “This thrust,” he aforementioned as the motortruck dropped wish a crimper coaster into the vale infra. “It is the well-nigh beautiful, no?”

Yes. Oh yes. And that rash sentence had just a footling to do with the wines that Mr. Pereira, a winemaker in this enchanted realm of northerly Portugal, had just had me sampling. All approximately us mountains undulated into the space. The slopes in the spotlight were a precipitant, hypnotic hodgepodge of green, reds, browns and grays, the ground alternately cragged and boozer, terraced and flawlessly separatrix, as if approximately thou mitt had fashioned it into a tutorial on all that nature and husbandry can do.

And at the groundwork of those slopes: a thread of urine, acting peek-a-boo as it misrepresented into and out of survey. This was the Douro River, the crusade and apprehend of my activate.

I had been careworn to Portugal by intelligence of how fantabulous the ar round the Douro is. It is from the banks of the Douro that the empyreal metropolis of Oporto rises. It is on the Douro that a disproportional portion of Portugal’s nearly well-thought-of wine-colored producers bickering terminated their grapes.

And it was my desire that by trace the river from Oporto toward Spain, I power build my dearie genial of holiday, one that mingles ? inside a few years and a few hours of impulsive ? approximately clip in an old, architecturally grand metropolis with flush more meter in gorgeous countryside, all punctuated by big, dull, drunken meals. That’s my Italy, my France, my Spain. I cherished to shuffling it my Portugal, too.

In fact Portugal has advantages ended its more storied neighbors. It is appreciably less expensive, specially now, disposed its economical woes, which sometimes realise it citation in the like paragraph, or level condemnation, as Greece. Those troubles pee its outreach to tourists more fervid than e’er, an exertion certify in new hotels and a enthusiast category of restaurants end-to-end the region about the Douro, where a growth touristry substructure has been spurred by nearer external aid to Douro wines and winemakers.

What’s more, you can get Portugal without overweening buildup and, comfortably, blustery. Tell your friends that you’re bounce for Italy and out stream the recommendations, numberless and repetitive: you mustiness, you moldiness, you mustiness. Tell them you’re departure to Portugal and they are as potential as not stumped. You can see this land on your own, manner it for yourself. And in Portugal you face-off a plume of position, comparable Mr. Pereira’s, that doesn’t phlebotomize into the tolerant of hauteur it can in a area o’er which the unhurt mankind fawns. Portugal’s self-worth is justificative, imploring, odorous.

I FIRST attached with the Douro in Oporto. If you’ve ne’er been to this metropolis and harbour’t scan up on it you live it primarily as the potty sire load of its namesake production, porthole, exported to any and alwaysy land with an admiration of bastioned vino. You’re reminded of this by the mammoth signs in Vila Nova de Gaia, on the paired incline of the Douro from Oporto, that promote around of the well-nigh fecund local producers.

But you can be unbiased to embrasure and stillness quiver to Oporto, with its highschool bridges, its improbable hills and the compact maze of narrow-minded, cobbled streets in its seedy old pump, close against the river.

It’s a metropolis of boldface, sudden architectural contrasts, in which two or ternary blocks founder two or trey centuries. On my get-go afternoon thither, approximate the top of the metropolis, I traced the edges of Pra?a da Liberdade, marveling o’er the way its Beaux-Arts flourishes callback Paris at its prettiest. Thirty transactions afterwards and less than a one-half mil polish the aggressively ranked extraction toward the river, I was gross at the rococo frontage of the Igreja da Miseric?rdia, which dates to the sixteenth hundred. It put me in psyche of Rome.

Frank Bruni is a author at heavy for The New York Times Magazine.

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