I wanted to share my experience with a portion of our travel to help those who may be travelling from Porto back to Lisbon to then hop on their plane back to the US/Canada.
We spent 5 days in Lisbon, then took the train to Porto, stayed in Porto for 3 days, then returned to Lisbon on Wednesday morning and flew out that Wednesday early afternoon. It’s doable and I learnt a few things that settled down my worries.
Our schedule from Porto to the Airport was something like this:
- 5:30am high speed train from Porto Campanha station to Lisbon Oriente, arriving just shortly BEFORE 8:30am.
- Lisbon Oriente station is also a metro station (Red Line) so we could take the red line directly to the Lisbon Airport and we’re there.
- flight left Lisbon at 12:50pm so we needed to be ready to board around 11:50am or shortly afterwards.
It turned out this was all doable and we were not rushed at all.
First, I was worried about ground transportation from our hotel (Moov Hotel) to Porto Campanha station that early in the morning. I wanted to be at the station by 5:00am-ish because (a) I don’t if ground transport at those hours is doable; what if no car show up, etc., we would still have time to either find another car ride or even walk to the station is needed; and (b) I don’t know what the interior of the station is like and whether it would be confusing to navigate etc. etc. Turns out it’s not confusing. And turns out, yes you can get taxi even at 4:30am in the morning, so no problem.
Anyway, our hotel called up a taxi for us and in about 5 minutes taxi arrived at the hotel door step at 4:45am and off we go. Cost of the ride is about 8.50 Euros and we arrived by 5am with LOTS of time to spare.
Then we waited for the AP train.
(Aside: Now, an interesting thing is that on our inbound journey from Lisbon to Porto, we witnessed — not experienced — a more than 1 hour delay by the AP train to Porto. Luckily, we were not taking that AP train so it didn’t affect us. We were taking the 9:30am intercity slower train. But imagine, a high speed train that is supposed to leave Lisbon Oriente station at 8:09am and it did not arrive until past 9:30am! WTH? I just laugh because I think unlike other more time efficient European countries, things in Portugal are a bit more laxed and sometimes somewhat broken-ish. It would be really unheard of in East Asia for a high speed train to be that delayed!
Anyhow, back to my Porto to Lisbon journey.
Our AP train did arrive on time at 5:30am. I planned it so that if either we missed this train or this train did not arrive, the next train to Lisbon would be at 6:30am (a non-AP slower train) that would arrive in Lisbon Oriente around 9:30am, still time to get to airport.
Our AP train ride back to Lisbon was on time and uneventful. Transfer in Oriente from railway train to metro was seamless and easy, and we got to the airport with plenty of time to spare and time to go through multiple securities and passport checks.
Oh, sometime thing else to share:
You can get coffee/drinks and snacks on either the AP train or the slower intercity railways when travelling from Lisbon to Porto and back. Initially, because of the early morning times, we were “worried” about breakfast and thought we may need to buy pastries the day before to carry with us on the train to eat. Ok, you can do that, but it’s not necessary if you’re ok with train cafe offerings. The selection is reasonable and for N. American prices, the cost is really really reasonable.