It was time to venture out of Porto, and we had many choices. First up, an epic tour of the Wonderful World of Wine, also known as the Douro Valley, and our first stop was the fairytale town of Amarante. It’s quite a popular place and a must-see destination for most of the tour companies. Thankfully, we got there early and avoided the crowds. You should do the same.
Amarante is the only place in the world where you can stroll across a bridge built by a saint who outsmarted the devil, and then celebrate your good fortune by eating a pastry shaped like a penis. This postcard-pretty town isn’t just a scenic riverside escape; it’s a masterclass in religious quirkiness and military grit.
The town’s patron saint, São Gonçalo, was a 13th-century monk who basically played “The Sims” with the local infrastructure, controlling every aspect of life. Legend has it he wanted to build the Ponte de São Goncalo Bridge to help locals cross the Tâmega River, but ran short of funding and labor.
To keep workers happy, he reportedly struck a rock with his staff and made wine flow out like a keg — or, in a more gruesome version, he split his own head open to pour out the “divine juice”. Either way, he knew how to get people’s attention. Jesus played the same card.
When the project got too big for him to handle, he supposedly made a deal with the devil: the devil would finish the bridge in exchange for the soul of the first living being to cross it. Clever Gonçalo sent a dog across first, leaving the devil with a soul he probably didn’t want.
Centuries later, this same bridge became the site of a legendary 14-day standoff during the Peninsular War in 1809. You can still see the commemorative plaque at the bridge entrance. And to this day, the people of Amarante take great pride in their spirit of resistance.
The “standoff” is known as the Siege of Amarante, and it was a really big deal. The bridge itself was the front line.
Napoleon’s Marshal Soult had invaded northern Portugal that year and taken Porto. Amarante, sitting on the Tâmega River about 30 miles east, controlled a key crossing point and route inland. Portuguese militia and townspeople, rather than a large regular army, dug in and held the São Gonçalo Bridge itself as the choke point. The French couldn’t easily force a crossing of the Tâmega elsewhere, so the bridge became the literal standoff line. The Portuguese held off the French for nearly two weeks, which allowed British forces elsewhere in Portugal to move against other targets. So the delay had real strategic value beyond just local pride. It bought valuable time for British General Wellington’s counteroffensive that would retake Porto shortly after. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a happy ending for the town. Once the French finally broke through and captured the bridge, they pillaged and vandalized Amarante as retribution for the resistance.
São Gonçalo, a man of many talents, is also the unofficial “Saint Valentine” of the region, especially for older women seeking husbands. He was like a Medieval Tinder.
Single women visited his tomb in the Igreja São Gonçalo and pulled the rope around the saint’s statue three times to find a spouse. Don’t laugh! The desperate custom continues to this day.
But what do penis pastries have to do with horny women?
The origins of the tradition are lost in the annals of time, but it’s thought the custom stems from pre-Catholic times, with its roots in pagan fertility rituals. Northern Portugal was home to Celtic and later Roman cultures that openly used phallic symbols as emblems of fertility and good fortune long before Christianity arrived.
São Gonçalo, the popular Catholic priest, developed a folk reputation as a matchmaker — a patron of marriages and fertility — which made him a natural figure onto whom older pagan practices could be grafted. The most likely explanation is that phallus-shaped baked goods were a holdover from pre-Christian times — possibly Roman — as fertility symbols.
The government tried to stop it.
Around 1926, the cakes were declared obscene by the government and prohibited, though people still made them secretly. It wasn’t until 1974 that the laws changed, allowing people to once again openly produce them. The ban — and its failure — tells you how deeply embedded the tradition was.
Today, they are proudly sold year-round in shops like Confeitaria da Ponte, where Inna & I sampled several shapes and sizes. They are coated in a white sugar jizz. To be honest, they were pretty bland.
I found it interesting that in the religious Disneyland of Fátima, the penis was strictly off limits, but 150 miles north, there was a town that had turned the penis into its commercial reason to be. Clearly, in Portugal, the Catholic Church’s grip on morality does not extend to baked goods.
