The Lodge of Calem

You can not miss this building – it’s massive. As soon as you have passed the Bridge D.Luiz on your way from Porto to Gaia you will notice this beautiful, long-stretched white building. The main entrance is easy to recognize – it’s crowned by a beautiful coat of arms.

You shouldn’t miss this tour – it’s very interesting. The entrance hall is already a very well done mixture of stone and glass – which makes it look very historic and also very modern and transparent. While you wait for the tour to start, a projector shows beautiful old labels.

The tour is available in the following languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese and French

What distinguishes this Lodge from (nearly) all the other Lodges is the Fado-Show (only QUEVEDO exposes their visitors also to this beautiful music). Every evening at 18:30 the last tour of the day ends with a presentation of this typical Portuguese music. For EUR 17.50 the visitor gets not only two glasses of Port but can also learn a lot about Fado.

May it be due to the fantastic location, may it be due to the Fado-Show, be it due to word of mouth: This lodge might be the lodge with the most visitors – roughly 175.000 people each year find their way to this place.

In the good old days, before all the dams were built that control nowadays the flow of the Douro, it was normal for the lower parts of Gaia to get flooded in rainy winters. Some of these floods were quite dramatic. One of the most impressive moments during the tour is when you are standing in front of a sign that shows the high-water-marks of several big floods. 1909 must have been really scary – for sure a big disruption to the Port trade. However, the river water doesn’t enter into the barrels – so the wine is safe. The bigger problem is that the flood can easily move the barrels around – and then they have to be picked up, they have to be sorted and put into the right spot. Luckily there were no real big floods in the last two decades.

By the way: You can rent a part of the Lodge for private dinners and events – a pretty cool place to celebrate family-events!