Porto

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Why Porto Rewards Smart Budget Travelers I almost booked a river-view room in Ribeira and felt very pleased with myself — until I noticed the room two streets uphill, a seven-minute walk from the same view, was going for €40 less a night. Same cobblestones, same tram noise, same smell of freshly baked pastéis de nata drifting from the café below. The only difference was that I’d done the ten minutes of research that this guide does for you. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Cheap Flights from Paris to Porto — and Why Everyone’s Going I nearly talked myself out of booking it. The fare was €27 on a Tuesday in February — so cheap I assumed I’d misread it or there was a catch hiding in the fine print. There wasn’t. I was sitting on the Ribeira riverfront eating a pastel de nata and watching the Dom Luís I bridge glow in the afternoon light less than three hours after leaving Paris. Cheap flights from Paris to Porto are that simple, and that good. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Porto, Without the Rookie Mistakes We landed at OPO on a bright September morning, hauled our bags toward the taxi rank, and a man waiting for the Metro just nodded at the purple-line sign and said, “Same place, a fraction of the price.” We took the train. Thirty minutes later we stepped out near the centre having spent the cost of a normal ticket — and the cab queue we’d nearly joined was still inching forward as we walked away. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. The Best Time to Visit Portugal, in One Sentence The August quote came back at 240 euros a night for a plain Lagos apartment, and my wife just turned her laptop around so I could see it. “Or,” she said, scrolling, “the same place, last week of September, is 150.” We almost booked August anyway, because everyone tells you Portugal in late September is “a gamble.” It isn’t. We swam in a sea that was warmer than it had been all summer, walked a clifftop trail with maybe six other people on it, and I’ll tell you below the exact mistake we nearly made with the dates. ...