Porto for The Curious Wanderers: a Friday-to-Monday weekend

Beneath the gilded nave, a glass floor opens onto an ossuary of brothers and benefactors, the strangest room in the city centre.

Paint and glaze your own tile with a studio that salvages and reproduces historic patterns; it is fired and posted after you leave.

The pork-shoulder sandwich with Serra cheese, eaten at a counter with the people who built the city.

Go early for the tripe sellers, the flower women and the cheese counters before the tour groups arrive at eleven.

Reconstructed pharmacies, alembics and a Tibetan apothecary in a house in the gardens above the river; nobody told you about this one.

Nuno Mendes cooking with northern producers, cheese from Trás-os-Montes and bread from a wood oven; dinner where the food is the point.

Romanesque fortress church with a tiled cloister and a treasury of reliquaries; the classic, and quieter on a Sunday morning.

A poet's private collection of alchemical-looking objects, ceramics and anticlerical wit in a Nasoni house beside the cathedral.

A narrow Ribeira tavern with tripas à moda do Porto and vinho verde from clay jugs.

Two churches separated by the narrowest house in Porto, built so the nuns and the monks would never share a wall.

The merchants' stock exchange and its Arab Room, built on the fortunes of port and cork; the guided tour runs every half hour.

Pressed spiced sausage hot dogs with a secret sauce in a room that has not changed since 1976; eat standing, then the metro.