Jardim de Carrilho Videira, Porto

Jardim de Carrilho Videira is a compact nineteenth-century landscape work with an unexpectedly rich botanical character. Created in 1897 by the landscape gardener Jerónimo Monteiro da Costa, it was regarded as one of his most successful projects because it preserves plant specimens found nowhere else in Porto’s public gardens. Its earlier name was Jardim do Carregal; the present name commemorates Carrilho Videira, an activist in the republican movement at the end of the nineteenth century.

Let your eyes travel through the planting rather than treating this as a mere shortcut between streets. Despite its limited area, the garden contains a valuable collection of conifers, giving this small space much of its character. In 2009, a statue of Professor Abel Salazar, made by the sculptor Hélder Carvalho, was installed here.

The garden belongs to Miragaia, in Porto, and its older Carregal name still helps explain why you may hear it called by two different names. It is a concentrated piece of Porto’s garden-making: nineteenth-century design, distinctive vegetation, and a twentieth-century intellectual remembered in sculpture.