Between the riverbank and Fontainhas we find the Calçada das Carquejeiras (straw carriers). It's a two hundred metre ramp, with a vertiginous incline, which even today convinces those who stroll along it to look for another way up the hill. But this is where the route of the carquejeiras began - women who carried huge bales of carqueja (straw) on their backs to take them all over the city, for use in the bakers' ovens and in the manor's fireplaces.

Near the top of this ramp, where the carquejeiras possibly rested only momentarily from the painful effort they had just undertaken, there is now a statue in their honour, making visible the cruelty of this labour. This statue is the result of the efforts of the Associação de Homenagem às Carquejeiras do Porto, a group that fought to ensure that Porto would never again forget the tortured bodies of those who walked the streets with a city on their backs.