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The Rebello Hotel & Spa
Porto, Portugal · Independent · Accessible Luxury
Seven derelict sheds on the Gaia quay, built to hold port wine and later turned over to making pots and cutlery, became this 103-apartment hotel in the summer of 2023. Metro Urbe kept the long stone river fronts and slid two new blocks into the slope behind them, while Daniela Franceschini of Quiet Studios furnished the rooms with rippled headboards, steel-framed glass and work by Porto makers. The name bends rabelo, the flat wooden boats that once brought wine down the Douro, and the restaurant Pot&Pan serves dinner in the pans the place used to make.
- 103 rooms
- Opened 2023
- Neighborhood: Cais de Gaia
- Architect: Metro Urbe
- Interiors: Daniela Franceschini (Quiet Studios)
About The Rebello Hotel & Spa
- According to its developers the hotel sits directly above the only working wooden boat repair and boatbuilding yard left on the Porto riverfront.
- The 103 apartments come in eleven layouts running from 37 to 195 square metres, up to three-bedroom penthouses and duplexes with private terraces.
- The spa is modelled on Roman baths, and the fourth-floor rooftop bar looks straight across the Douro at the Dom Luís I bridge and the Ribeira houses.
- The port lodges of Gaia and the World of Wine complex are five minutes' walk away; the Atlantic beaches past the fishing village of Afurada are about ten minutes by bike.
History
The site on the Gaia bank of the Douro began as warehousing for the port wine trade, the buildings that received the wine brought downriver by rabelo boat before it was shipped abroad. Later the same nineteenth-century sheds were given over to industry, ending as a factory making kitchen utensils and cutlery, and by the time the Bomporto group bought them they were seven unused buildings on a steeply sloping plot.
Architects Metro Urbe consolidated the site into four buildings: two long river-facing structures whose stone facades and structure were preserved, and two new central blocks that absorb smaller original structures and resolve the slope. Interiors are by the Spanish designer Daniela Franceschini of Lisbon-based Quiet Studios, who worked with local artists and craftspeople and took water, wood and wine as her references: steel-framed glass partitions, concrete floors, metal light fittings, travertine and walnut kitchenettes, rippling headboards that quote the river, and chairs by the Collector Group. The hotel opened in the summer of 2023 as Bomporto's third property in Portugal, after roughly five years of development, with 103 apartments in eleven types from 37 to 195 square metres, the ground-floor restaurant Pot&Pan under chef André Coutinho serving Portuguese cooking in shared pots and pans, the River Social cafe and shop, a fourth-floor rooftop bar and restaurant, a spa modelled on Roman baths, and underground parking. The name is a small twist on rabelo.
The setting
Cais de Gaia is the south bank of the Douro, in Vila Nova de Gaia rather than Porto itself, and it is where the port wine actually lives: the lodges that mature it are a five-minute walk uphill, along with the World of Wine museum complex that opened in 2020 on the site of more old cellars. Across the water the Ribeira quay stacks up in colour, tied to this bank by the Dom Luís I bridge of 1886, built by Théophile Seyrig, once Gustave Eiffel's partner. Downstream the riverbank passes the fishing village of Afurada and reaches the Atlantic and its sunset-facing beaches in about ten minutes by bike.
Restaurants and bars
- Pot&Pan — Restaurant
Experiences
- Rooftop bar — A rooftop bar on the riverside, listed as a feature of the hotel in press coverage.
Amenities
- Garden access for meetings
- Dedicated events team handling enquiries from enquiry to eating
- Sales team for meetings, events and local event space network in Porto
- Private dining hire of Pot&Pan
Open The Rebello Hotel & Spa in the atlas for live weekend rates, photos, and the full folio.
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