InterContinental Porto - Palácio das Cardosas

Praça da Liberdade is where Porto measures itself from. Avenida dos Aliados runs north from it to the city hall, São Bento station is a minute east with its 20,000 painted tiles, and the Clérigos tower is three minutes west. The Palácio das Cardosas occupies the south side of the square, behind an 18th-century facade built on the site of a former convent.

The conversion kept the exterior and the proportions and put a full-service five-star behind them. There are 113 rooms and suites, some laid out as duplexes over two floors, ranging from around 23 square metres up to a Prestige Suite of more than 90. Decoration is classical and restrained rather than themed, with soundproofing that does real work on a square this busy. Several ground-floor units are given over to jewellery boutiques, which is a very Porto detail.

There is a restaurant doing contemporary Portuguese à la carte alongside set menus, a bar, a 24-hour gym, a sauna and treatment rooms. There is no pool. Pets are allowed.

What you are buying is the address. Almost nothing in central Porto is more than fifteen minutes on foot: the cathedral five, the Ribeira eight, Livraria Lello five, the Dom Luís I bridge and the port lodges across it a little further downhill. The airport is around thirteen minutes by car, and the metro runs from Trindade nearby.

Two honest notes. This is a large international five-star operating on chain systems, and while the building is genuinely historic, the experience is closer to a well-run city hotel than to the small independents elsewhere in this collection. And Praça da Liberdade has been a construction site for metro works, which is worth checking before you book a room facing it.