Yesterday we arrived at our hotel in Porto, the Torel Palace Porto. As this is yet another converted Palace, I was worried somewhat. As I mentioned in an earlier post, many of the companies who buy and convert very old Palaces are undercapitalized and don’t fully fix up the property to multi-star hotel status. The Torel group seems to have done a great job of renovating this property, as well as the Torel Lisbon (as far as I can tell from the website pictures).

This place looks great, although there are idiosyncrasies in our room.

In order to understand our room, please use your imagination on the sketch above of the floor plan. You enter through a door on the lower right. Straight in front of you is the sofa, shown at the bottom of the sketch. Every surface inside the oval line is mirrored. So if you’re standing to the right of the bed in the sketch and look at the wall in front of you, this is what you see.

Similarly, standing by the entrance and looking at the sofa or the mirrored wall in front of it, this next picture is what you’ll see.

It was all very confusing for a while after we got here. I kept walking into mirrors when I thought i was turning into a clear space. After 24 hours, it’s starting to make sense and I’m not running into things anymore.

Here are a few more pictures of the room, and then of the other parts of the hotel. As you can see, it’s quite elegant.