Porto & Lisbon

Porto & Lisbon: June 2016

I spent about 2 weeks in Portugal in June 2016. I visited Porto, Lisbon and Lagos (which I made a separate post for). We travelled around by train and bus and stayed in Airbnbs which worked perfectly.

Porto

Porto is the city of tiles and extreme bridges! It was so beautiful. Our Airbnb was also the nicest one we stayed in. Everywhere you go there is just the most colourful and cute buildings. Walking across the bridges is breathtaking as they are so high up and give the most stunning views. Equally as nice is walking along with waterfront and stopping for ice cold beers all along the way.

Porto has really good shopping, amazing food & restaurants and is cheap too! I had the best vegan burger maybe ever when I was there just at the first open shop we found, I have no idea what the name of the shop was. The beach is also very near, one day we hired bikes and traveled south down the coast beach hopping along the way. The neighbourhood Sampaio on the south side of the bridges is really nice to explore, especially if you like fresh barbecued seafood.

Lisbon

We spent a few days in Lisbon, we travelled by train from Porto which was really easy. Lisbon again is a beautiful a highly picturesque city, filled with cute narrow streets, dramatic waterfront bridges, a major grand entrance and a castle with the most epic view of the city.

We also happened to be there at the same time as their Sardine Festival. If you’re planning on going to Lisbon try and be there for this because it was on of the most memorable experiences of all my travels. It’s basically a giant street party. On every corner there are stalls selling drinks and food, there are thousands of people crowding the narrow alleyways with DJ set ups on balconies of the above apartments, there are old ladies sitting around eating buckets of snails with sardine hats on. It was such an unexpected event to stumble across and cost us nothing! This festival happens around mid June each year.

After the Sardine festival we were too tired to explore Lisbon by foot or public transport so we bought tickets for those awful open roof tourist buses and proceeded to sleep all over Lisbon! The nap was good but definitely not worth the money.

Another added bonus Uber in Lisbon is amazing and dirt cheap.