1880 Facts about Port and Madeira by Henry Vizetelly

The PoH Wine Capital—Villa Nova Wine Lodges. 115

Opoi'to Crystal Palace; while to tlie east, and immediately in front of the famous Serra convent, a tasteless colossal square edifice, known as the Bishop's Palace, towers above the sur rounding buildings. The vast Serra convent, parcelled out to-day in dwellings for the working classes, and occupying,with its octagonal church,a bold and lofty eminence on the VillaITova side of the river, is certain to form a prominent object in the view. The Douro—^here broad and placid enough,and spanned by a lofty railway bridge—is always teeming with life. Among the schooners and the barques discharging their cargoes of wheat and flour from America, and dried cod from Norway and New foundland,the Newcastle and Cardiff coUiers, and the solitary steamer taking in its thousand or so pipes of fruity or tawny Port, there is no end of smaller craft, including large broad- beamed fishing-boats—with the invocation,"God preserve us," rudely painted in red letters on their sides—putting out to sea manned by as many as fifty or sixty hands, who, when the wind fails the huge lateen sails, row out of port, standing with their faces towards the bows after the fashion common to the Levant; also coasting rascas, with stumpy masts aud tapering lateen sails, Orieutal-lookiug high-prowed begas and saveiras, and clumsy gondola-like toldes, with an occasional yacht or launch owned by some Englishman of aquatic tastes. Then there are the flat-bottomed wine-boats,with large square sails and formid able-looking rudders, discharging their cargoes of youthful Port from the Alto Douro at Villa Nova, together with innumerable ferry-boats,with low wooden awnings, plying incessantly between one bank ofthe river and the olhei. The quays,and on market-days the streets, of Oporto are uU of animation,and it is evident that more than their fair share of the heavy work falls upon the weaker sex. Most of the lower- class women have either a bullock-goad m their hand or half-a- hundredweight on their heads. Wearing short full skirts that display their well-shapen bare legs, coiffured with bright kerchiefs and black turban-shaped hats,their breasts adorned with huge gold brooches,and their ears hung with huge gold