Torel Palace Porto

The Campos Navarro family made their money exporting fabric, wine, olive oil and cereals, and in 1861 they built a house that said so. The Palacete Campos Navarro is a four-storey Romantic-era mansion, and its single best feature is the circular skylight crowning the staircase. Look up into the cupola and among the floral stucco you will find Mercury, god of merchants, and Minerva, goddess of arts and science, with allegorical figures of Industry and Seafaring beside them. A family portrait, in plaster, of exactly how they saw themselves.

A two-year restoration brought the building back and it opened as a hotel in early 2020. The designer was Isabel Sá Nogueira, who also worked on Torel Avantgarde across the city, and the theme here is Portuguese literature. Each of the 24 rooms and suites is named for a writer or poet: Camões, Bocage, Pessoa, Eça de Queiroz, Florbela Espanca, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen. On the first floor the original stucco ceilings carry portraits of some of them, which is presumably what suggested the idea in the first place.

Rooms vary a great deal in size and layout, as they do in any converted house. Some have onyx tubs and basins set into the bedroom, others restored painted ceilings. There are eight categories across four floors, plus 18 apartments in the building opposite, so it is worth reading the descriptions rather than booking blind.

Downstairs, a library where the books are installed on the ceiling like a constellation. The restaurant, BLIND, is named for the Saramago novel and run by Vitor Matos of Antiqvvm; it took a Michelin star in February 2025. Florbela handles pastry. The Calla Wellness Suite is a small spa rather than a full one.

The courtyard is the surprise. A green pool sits in it, hemmed by the pink facade on one side and a wall of planting on the other, with chandeliers hung from a vine-covered pergola. It should be too much and somehow isn't.

The hotel holds one Michelin Key. It is on Rua de Entreparedes, near the cathedral, which puts you above the Ribeira rather than in it.