Porto for The Time Travellers: a Friday-to-Monday weekend

The twelfth-century fortress cathedral, rose window and battlements, then Nasoni's loggia and the tiled cloister added when the baroque arrived.

Nicolau Nasoni's 1763 bell tower, 225 steps, the whole baroque skyline read from the top as the lamps come on below.

Dinner on the Aliados under the 1933 murals of the Guarany, bacalhau and a Douro white, where the city's politics were argued for a century.

The merchants' stock exchange of 1842 toured in half an hour: the glass-roofed Nations courtyard and the gilt Arab Room built to impress creditors.

Three hours of Roman walls, the port wine treaty and the siege of 1832, told by guides who work for tips and know the gossip.

A 1939 dining room of tile and wood, tripas à moda do Porto for the brave and roast kid for the rest, with a bottle of Bairrada.

Rem Koolhaas's faceted concrete polyhedron of 2005; the daily tour gets you into the tiled VIP room and the hall's plywood belly.

Álvaro Siza's white museum folded into a park, with the pink art-deco Casa de Serralves of 1940 as the counterpoint.

Siza's 1963 tea house on the rocks, now a starred restaurant where every window frames the Atlantic; the one dinner worth the ticket, booked weeks ahead.

Seyrig's 1886 double-deck iron arch, crossed on the top deck with the metro; Cardoso's 1963 concrete Arrábida is downstream for comparison.

The Carrancas palace, Soult's headquarters when Wellington crossed the river in 1809, now the national museum of nineteenth-century painting.

Toasts and coffee in the 1899 café where the republicans plotted, a few steps from the Clérigos and the airport metro at Trindade.