The city of Porto is a rich and historic city on the northern coast of Portugal. This city is full of azure tiles churches, red roofed buildings, towering bridges, and historic rabelo boats. And it’s cheap 🙂 As such, it has attracted loads of tourists in the past decade. Porto is quickly building its tourist infrastructure and promises to be an amazing quick weekend getaway or a short stop on a whirlwind trip across Europe. If you’re interested in making Porto travel a reality, keep reading for all of the most frequently asked questions about making your perfect Port travel plans.
What is the Best Time to Visit Porto?
Porto has a mild climate year round making it attractive to lots of northern visitors. However, in the winter months it rains regularly.
Heck, it even rains regularly in the summer though the showers are less frequent. However, in the summer months, tourists from across Europe and the world flock to Porto for a warm summer holiday. Additionally, the heat can be hot in a town with small winding streets that limit the cooling effects of the breeze.
Therefore, we’d recommend visiting in the shoulder seasons, Spring and Fall. You’ll get milder temperatures and fewer crowds. We visited in October, had 80°F days and, while we thought the crowds were wild, we were told there were about half as many visitors as in the summer months. – That all being said, the day we left it was 60ºF and raining so remember that weather is unpredictable everywhere in the world 😉
Where is Porto? A Porto Geography Lesson
Porto is the second largest city in Portugal (Lisbon being the largest). The city is famous for being the storage center for the port wine, produced in the Douro Valley, aged in Porto and then shipped worldwide.
The Douro River runs from the Douro Valley, to Porto, and then on to the Atlantic Ocean.
On the north side of the river, you’ll find Porto, with several neighborhoods. The Riberia, or riverfront neighborhood, and the Baxia, or Cathedral neighborhood, are where you’ll find a majority of the tourist attractions.
Additionally, the Vila Nova de Gaia, or Gaia, is the city on the south side of the river. This is where all of the port lodges are and the prime tourist attraction in this city is wine tasting.
While these are two separate cities, for the sake of this post, we’ll refer to the entire area as Porto because it’s very easy to visit both cities when putting together your Porto travel plans.
How do You Get to Porto?
Porto has a large international airport which makes it easy to get to from afar – we personally thought it was nicer than the Lisbon airport.
Porto also has a great train station with trains regularly arriving from Lisbon throughout the day. They even have express trains (Alfa Pendular) from Lisbon which actually take just a long as flights (once you calculate time to get through security). There are also trains arriving from elsewhere in Portugal and Spain.
Lastly, Porto has a well developed highway system so that arriving by car is easy as well. However, having a car is Porto is a bad idea as traffic is horrible on those crowded tiny streets. If you’re arriving by car, make sure to ditch it before entering Porto proper as it will save you money and time.
Getting Around Porto
Porto is a super compact city. Aside from the taxi we took to/from the airport, we walked everywhere in Porto. We had planned on taking the public transportation in the city as it is cheap and efficient. However, we realized that public transportation routes often avoided tourist areas so taking a tram or bus would only save us a short walk.
If you are interested in using public transportation because you’re visiting spread out areas or staying outside of the tourist districts, you can pay per ride or you can considered getting a tourist pass that provides you with unlimited rides for a set period of time. However, be warned that Porto is super walkable and often a metro or bus ride won’t be worth the time (we wasted money on a tourist pass ourselves).
However, if you follow our Porto itinerary, we’ve put all of the top things to do in Porto into a nice order that cuts down on travel distances and can be easily walked.
** I should note that “easily walked” in Porto means short in distance, not necessarily easy. This hilly city can be exhausting to navigate as it seems like you’re constantly walking up a hill.
Ride shares are convenient for longer journeys. But make sure you have Bolt, it is the preferred ride share app of the area and we had a much higher success rate with rides actually showing up on this app vs. Uber or Lyft.
Where Should You Stay In Porto?
We had so many suggestions for places to stay in Porto that we wrote a whole post about it. If you’re at the point where you’re choosing accommodations, check out our post here for suggestions for every budget.
What Is There to do in Porto?
There are so many things to do in Porto we had to create a whole separate post to list them. In our article on Things to do in Porto we list plenty to do.
But we’ll spoil it here for you 😉 Our favorite things to do in Porto were:
- Touring the Bolsa Palace
- Eating Pastéis de Nata
- Touring port wine lodges
- Climbing Clerigos Tower
- Boating under the 6 bridges of Porto
How Much Does a Trip to Porto Cost?
Porto, like the rest of Portugal, is cheap by Western European standards.
Here’s what we spent on two days and 3 nights in Porto for two adults:
- Accommodations: $340
- Food: $200 – we could have very easily cut back on this. We ate about 4 meals each day.
- Attractions: $220
This brings our grand total of money spent on our Porto travel plans to $760 or $190/person/day.
What to Pack for Porto?
Don’t forget your rain jacket like I did. It frequently showers in Porto as clouds blow in from the ocean. You could pack an umbrella, several people were using them. However, I hate carrying around a heavy umbrella when I could stuff my light rain jacket, or Scott’s rain jacket, in a bag.
Additionally, you’ll want to make sure you pack comfortable and sturdy shoes. Porto has lots of uneven cobblestone sidewalks that you’ll be traversing. You’ll need shoes with good soles, lots of support and minimal heel.
Is Porto Safe?
On paper, Porto is a safe city. It has low crime rates. Similar to other smaller tourist cities, things like theft top the list of common crimes.
However, we felt very unsafe is some of the most touristy areas. Portugal has legalized the use of all drugs in the home. However, those drugs were visibly seen outside of homes as well. We were offered crack several times, saw people smoking crack in touristy streets, had drunk people throw bottles near us, LOTs of jeering and we did not feel safe outside after dark. Porto is felt like the least safe city we have ever visited (and as someone who may or may not have wound up in a police station while on vacation that’s saying something).
Do I Need To Speak Portuguese to Visit Porto?
Porto is a super touristy city in Portugal. And the universal language of western tourists is English. So pretty much every vendor in the tourist areas of Porto speak English well, or at least well enough to do their jobs. Portuguese language skills are not necessary, but they are kind. Learn your “please” and “thank yous” in Portuguese – and “excuse mes”, my Midwest self needs that one – and you should be fine for communicating in Porto.
Is Porto Worth It?
If Porto had felt safer, we would have loved it. The daytime hours in Porto were wonderful, there were plenty of things to do and the food was awesome. Plus, the city is cheap. So when it comes to assessing worth, I think of cost vs fun. Porto travel had low cost and a mid-level of fun so it was “worth” it.
However, I think we left Porto feeling super disillusioned with Portugal due to the feeling of unease we had everywhere we went. It’s hard to have lots of fun in a place when you’re constantly on alert. We left town feeling super stressed and not at all relaxed, which isn’t our idea of a good vacation. So would we recommend Porto, nope.
I know that’s a bummer of a way to end an article but there it is. We’ve reached the end. If you’re still interested in visiting Porto or the rest of Portugal, check out all of our posts on our Portugal travel page here. We promise there are things in Portugal that receive rave reviews 😉
