The city of Oporto, built along the hillsides overlooking the mouth of the Douro River, forms a millennial urban landscape where the diversity of civil and religious architecture bears testimony to a Historic Centre dating back to Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassical times. Built on uneven ground in a perfect combination of road layouts, houses and the river, Oporto has a unique cityscape marked by monuments such as the See, the Church of Santa Clara or the Stock Exchange Palace. Oporto’s Historic Centre was inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1996. Its monumental and landscape riches captures the diversity of urban layout solutions to be found also in other Western European and Atlantic-Mediterranean cities dating from medieval times.
