Mariana Costa

I studied architecture at FAUP, the school Álvaro Siza and Fernando Távora built on a hill above the Douro, and like half of my class I ended up doing something else. In my case, walking people around Porto and pointing at buildings. Porto is a city where a nineteenth-century merchant house, a Siza bank and a tiled church can share one street, and I like explaining why. My walks start in Ribeira and Miragaia, the old river quarter where my grandfather supplied the small groceries until the 1990s, and one of them ends at the galleries on Rua de Miguel Bombarda. I am 29, I talk fast, and I will stop in the middle of a pavement to show you a drainpipe. I speak Portuguese, English and Italian from an Erasmus year in Milan. The granite gets slippery when it rains, and in Porto it rains. These days I guide Porto live on video: I walk the streets with my phone and answer your questions as we go.