1. Bring a rain coat – and a sweater If you are planning a trip to Lisbon, here are a few notes on travelling to Portugal that you may find useful. The weather in Southern Europe is not always what people from the North expect. As a rule of thumb: winters are wetter than you…
The small town of Sintra north of Lisbon is the home of two royal palaces. The contrast between those two buildings could hardly be bigger. The National Palace near the town centre was built 1000 years ago for the Moorish rulers of the Taifa Kingdom of Lisbon (after the Cordoba Caliphate had broken up into…
Uptown and downtown Lisbon are two different worlds, and your strategy of experiencing the two unequal halves of the Portuguese capital should reflect this. For your uptown walk on the slopes of the city we suggested last week, you should pick a starting point and an end point on opposite ends of the old town…
One of the rules of “adventurous” travel is that you should not read too much in advance about a place you are going to visit, because otherwise, your trip is in danger of becoming a mere ticking-off-exercise of seeing things “in the flesh” that you have already studied in great detail on the Internet. Give…
The town of Aveiro, roughly an hour away from Porto by train, is a favourite daytrip destination for visitors of Portugal’s second city. Aveiro has become a busy tourist town mainly on the strength of two attractions – firstly, a network of urban canals, which is also the reason why the town is frequently called…
Happy accidents are the gold standard of tourist experiences. You walk somewhere in the town centre of your destination, take a turn off the main street, then another turn and yet another, and before you know what is happening, you find yourself in a part of the city that looks dramatically different from the pictures…
Porto, Portugal’s second city, is a relatively recent arrival on the list of Favoured European Travel Destinations. Over the past 20 years, it has made the leap from amateur status to the Premier League of tourist destinations, powered by double-digit annual growth rates of visitor numbers for over a decade. It now counts over 2.5…