I’ve done thousands of visits to the Douro Region. It’s not an exaggeration. My family roots come from there. Since I was a toddler, I would explore its nature and valleys with my family.

Now, due to my profession as a tour guide, I’ve managed to collect different perspectives and admiration tales by my guests from all over the world, regarding the Douro in each time of the year. I feel that is important, because my opinion would be bias.

It’s wintertime and many of you are wondering if it’s a good time to visit. I say, whenever you can visit is a good time to visit. It can be sunny, cloudy, foggy, stormy, or windy, but its beauty Is never questioned at the end.

I’ve done a lot of tours with a lot of rain and red warnings by the weather institute, so I have some stories to tell. One day, my clients were very depressed and sad because they tough their vacation would be among some lucky sunshine. It’s a matter of expectations, I know, but who wouldn’t want some good weather in their vacations? So, I started by making them feel comfortable by saying the weather could get worst eheheh and by saying I had sent some bottles to Saint Peter to bring some good weather. But in case the bottles didn’t work, I would explain to them that the Douro Region is beautiful in any kind of weather and that water is life.

After 1h20 minutes of driving and passing the mountain range of Marão, which creates a natural barrier between the green wine region and the douro region, we are received with a lot more rain and darker clouds. It was one of those mountain winter days. But that turn out to be a wonderful opportunity to see beautiful waterfalls. Something you wouldn’t see on a normal hot sunny day. Everything was green and majestic like a garden from heavens. Their eyes started to smile upon such beauty: Man made terraces full of vines complemented with olive trees.

I took them to family-owned wineries for them to taste the delicious wine of the region, the DOC Douro wines in the morning and the Porto wines in the afternoon. The wine always helps, but they were already loving it even with the rain. And for you to have an idea how much they were loving it; I would suggest stops in different locations to take some pictures of the landscape and they would never hesitated to get out of the van into the sopping rain.