Porto's modern side: a pink art-deco villa in a great park with Álvaro Siza's white museum, and Rem Koolhaas's faceted concert hall on the Boavista roundabout. Each is worth an afternoon.
Porto has produced two Pritzker-winning architects, Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura. Its modern buildings are as much a reason to visit as its baroque ones.
Serralves, on the way to Foz, is a single estate: a pink art-deco villa of the 1930s, an 18-hectare park of gardens, woods and a farm, and Álvaro Siza's white museum of contemporary art, opened in 1999. A treetop walk crosses the woods.
The Casa da Música, by Rem Koolhaas and opened in 2005, sits like a cut white gem on the Boavista roundabout. Inside, stairs climb past tiled terraces to a concert hall walled at each end in corrugated glass.
The concert hall runs guided tours and concerts most days, from its orchestra to jazz and pop.
An afternoon and an evening in western Porto.
The current exhibitions in Siza's light-filled galleries.
Walk the formal gardens, the lake and the treetop walk.
The art-deco house at the head of its long garden.
A guided tour of the halls and terraces.
Stay for whatever is playing in the big hall.
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Metro to Casa da Música; buses run from Boavista to Serralves on Avenida Marechal Gomes da Costa.
Serralves sells park-only or park-and-museum tickets; Casa da Música tours are booked online.
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons and Pexels under their licences.
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