Clérigos / Rua das Flores

Casa da Companhia Hotel and Spa, Vignette Collection

★★★★★

Casa da Companhia is a small luxury hotel with a big story, set at the top of Rua das Flores in Porto's historic centre. Its building, a restored sixteenth-century house, was once home to the Real Companhia Velha, the pioneering port wine company founded in the eighteenth century to regulate the trade and the Douro region, and the hotel's design takes that heritage as its theme, with rich fabrics, dark woods, wine-coloured accents and references to port and the trade's history throughout. It opened as the first European hotel in IHG's Vignette Collection, a group of independent-spirited hotels, and it has an intimate scale: just forty rooms and suites, with premium rooms of around thirty to thirty-eight square metres and suites up to over sixty, decorated in a refined, classic-contemporary style with marble bathrooms. The facilities are unusually generous for the old town. The Spa by L'Occitane has a heated indoor pool, a sauna and a hammam, and up on the roof an outdoor pool looks across the rooftops to the cathedral and the city skyline, one of the few rooftop pools in central Porto. Legado da Casa, the restaurant, serves contemporary Portuguese cuisine, and A Tasquinha offers Portuguese tapas in a more casual setting. Service is personal and attentive, as you would expect in a hotel of this size, and the concierge can arrange port tastings, Douro excursions and restaurant reservations around the city.

The address puts you in the Clérigos and São Bento district, the heart of the old town. From the door, São Bento station is a couple of minutes away, the Clérigos Tower and Livraria Lello a short walk uphill, and the whole of Rua das Flores, with its shops and terraces, leads down to the Ribeira and the Palácio da Bolsa. The Avenida dos Aliados and the Bolhão market are within an easy stroll, so the hotel works well for a first visit focused on walking.

Living in it: with only forty rooms, the hotel feels calm even when the streets outside are busy. Rooms facing the street get more light and life; interior rooms are quieter. The rooftop pool is the summer highlight and the indoor pool and spa make the hotel a good choice in the cooler months too. The restaurant is well regarded and makes dinner at home an easy option after a long day. Members of IHG's loyalty programme can earn and use points here, which is useful for some travellers.

Base math: rates are at the luxury end of the Porto market, comparable with the city's other five-star hotels, but the combination of two pools, a spa, a strong restaurant and a central location is hard to match. It suits couples, wine lovers drawn by the port company story, and travellers who want boutique intimacy with full-service facilities. Those who want river views should look at the Ribeira or Gaia instead.