Saúdade, Porto: A Month of Small Blessings in Portugal

Price: $11.99 - $3.99
(as of Oct 09, 2026 06:29:19 UTC – Details)


A contemplative travel memoir about love, loss, and the discoveries that only a shared journey can reveal.
When LJ Baqutoy and her partner Claus arrived in Porto, Portugal, in September 2022, they knew almost nothing about the country. They had no fixed itinerary, no guidebook agenda: just a rented apartment, a month of time, and the curiosity that had carried them across continents together. What followed was a journey of shared discoveries: hand-painted azulejo tiles that covered entire buildings; port wine cellars where centuries of patience aged in oak barrels; a river gorge that tested their legs and rewarded their persistence; and a tripe stew that carried LJ ten thousand miles back to the mountains of the Philippines where she grew up.
From Porto, they radiated outward: north to the medieval towns of Barcelos, Braga, and Guimarães; south to the fishing villages of Nazaré and Afurado, where grillmasters cooked sardines over charcoal by the sea; east to the terraced vineyards of the Douro Valley and the glacial summit of Torre, Portugal’s highest peak. In the middle of their stay, they crossed the border into Spain, where Claus’s cousin Jocki and his wife Birgit welcomed them into their home on the Mediterranean coast, a week of family, paella, morning swims, and a farewell dinner LJ would later call The Last Supper.
Both Claus and Jocki died within two months of each other in 2025. This memoir, dedicated to them both, looks back at their last wonderful journey of pure discovery, before illness, before loss, when the world still felt open and unwritten.
Saúdade, Porto is a book about travel as a way of knowing: knowing a country, knowing a partner, and knowing yourself through the places that surprise you and the people who walk beside you. Written with warmth, humor, and a contemplative eye that finds connections between a Portuguese fishing village and a Filipino mountain town, between a geologist’s reading of rock and a writer’s reading of the world, it is a love letter to the art of discovering a place together and to the man who made every discovery richer by sharing it.
Includes practical notes for travelers to Porto, the Douro Valley, northern Portugal, and southern Spain.

From the Publisher

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0FXPCDKPQ
Accessibility ‏ : ‎ Learn more
Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 4, 2026
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2.2 MB
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 148 pages
Page Flip ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Best Sellers Rank: #1,498,467 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store) #105 in General Portugal Travel Guides #285 in Walking (Kindle Store) #503 in Spain & Portugal Travel
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