Portugal 30 day itinerary feedback

I recommend checking water temperature, etc. I'm not sure it will be very comfortable in the water without a wetsuit. I'm definitely not a beach person, though.

Guimaraes used to have a rather interesting weekly market. Don't remember the schedule.

I don’t consider this to be leisurely - definitely not slow travel…I think you are being overly ambitious with too much driving. Remember the first week in April will be the Easter break with more crowds than usual.

I would encourage you to eliminate most, if not all the one night stays- they waste so much time checking in and out of hotels.
In the Douro, I prefer staying in towns on the river. Pinhao has lovely river views with short boat cruises.

Not certain why you are staying in Belmonte. It’s really in the middle of nowhere. I did visit there as part of a 12 historic villages tour and found it to be underwhelming.

Your spouse will need a wet suit to surf but Ericeira is a good base for visiting Mafra. And, it’s a lovely small town if you stay in the old town.

Remember the definition of slow travel is a week in each place. You might enjoy your trip more if you aim for that rather than racing all over the country.

just to add my two cents, I am also traveling in the spring to Portugal (late April to late May), 31 days. So far the plan is to stay in nine different places, as opposed to your 15. I'm not going so far as to be spending a week in each place, I have one overnighter, t;he rest are 4-6 nights. Renting a car for half of the trip. We eliminated the Algarve as the northern part and the eastern part looked more interesting. Your list looks like you will be spending a great deal of time just moving from one place to the next. For example, if you spend one night in Tomar and plan on visiting Alcobac and Batalha, when would you be visiting Tomar? This only makes sense to me if you like breezing through a place in order to see more places. I agree with kathrynj, you need to slow it down.

I can only speak to the places I’ve visited. Lamego itself can seen in a day. The walk up the 600 steps to Santuário de Nossa Senhora dos Remédios takes a little time. The chapel at the top isn’t that large. You can drive to it, but would then miss all the blue painted tiles on the landings. Three nights would be fine if you were going to take a day trip someplace.

Tomar is a nice small city worth a couple nights. It has the Convent of Christ where you’ll spend a couple hours and the castle ruins. The town is nice to walk around. From it we took day trips to Batalha, Fátima, and Almourol castle. Just my opinion, but if you visit Batalha monastery, you don’t need to visit Alcobaca monastery. We visited both.

Since you intend to visit Óbidos, I’d extend Nazaré to two nights. You can visit Óbidos in a couple hours (plus the travel time to get there). Nazaré’s upper town is the best part of the town and can be seen in a couple hours. The rest of Nazaré is a typical beach town. It does have a nice beach.

I was unimpressed with Aveiro. It had a couple canals and the main attraction seemed to be a very touristy boat ride. I’m sure it didn’t help that there was a lot of construction taking place along the waterfront. We were there for less than two hours.

By the time we arrived in the Braga, Guimarães area we didn’t have time to do them justice and we were tired of seeing religious sites, so we bypassed them on our way back to Spain.

On our recent trip we spent 3 nights in Coimbra, 4 in Tomar, 1 in Óbidos (only because my wife to spend a night there), 2 in Nazaré, and 3 in Porto.

Thank you for all your replies. I agree. My first version is way too ambitious. We have decided to nix Belmont/trancoso and Sines/Algarve.

Lisbon, Evora, Ericeira, Coimbra, Porto and maybe Pinhao (or somewhere else on the Duoro) will be our bases. And we will stay there multiple nights. No one nighters!

Im wondering if crowds start to slow after Easter Monday or are many people off the rest of that week?

Lora, the crowds around Easter extend from the week before through the week after. I think it’s because of the varying Easter breaks in the schools in Europe. Portugal gets a large number of Spanish for some reason at that time of the year.