A guide shopping in Porto
For a little session of shopping, the best place to start would be the shopping malls. In recent years most shops in Porto have clustered inside the malls, which make shopping quite easy now.
The newest malls are the Centro Comercial Peninsular and the charming Centro Comercial Via Caterina. The storefronts inside duplicate the facades you’d see in a folkloric village of northern Portugal. Inside these malls you can find shops which sell some of the best designer wares of noteworthy clothiers from France, Italy, and Spain. Other shopping malls include the Centro Comercial de Foz, adjacent to the sea, and the Centro Comercial Aviz, oddly located in the middle of the city’s largest concentration of automobile dealerships. Another big but seriously decayed mall is the Centro Comercial Brasilia, which is stocked with inexpensive manufactured goods from Asia. With a greater emphasis on clothing, furniture, and house wares is the Centro Comercial Cidade de Porto, whose shops are interspersed with restaurants, bars, movie theaters, and cafes.
If you’re looking for traditional Portuguese handcrafts you should visit the Regional Center of Traditional Arts. Here you can find large numbers of gloves, umbrellas, crystal, and embroideries, many of them crafted within the region. Another place selling unique handcrafts is Casa Margaridense, which is best known for the smooth and subtle cake, Pão de Ió, which has been made here on-site for at least a century. Interestingly enough, because of the trading between Japan and Portugal, the cake has become a Japanese delicacy and a household word.
