We loved our trip to Portugal! Booking throug...

Portugal | Jul 1 - Jul 10, 2023

Location was perfect and breakfast was great!

Location was perfect - we could walk to lots of great restaurants and the marina. Hotel even decorated our bed with rose petals for our honeymoon. The front desk was very helpful - they called taxis for us, made recommendations, and lent us towels for all of our day trips. We also had the best meal of our lives at Otaka, not to be missed!!! The pizza place right next door was also great. The hotel breakfast here was only okay, but it was nice to have somewhere to grab a quick bite before leaving for the day.

This place is right in the heart of a million restaurants, shops, street performers, etc. This was perfect for us, but also meant the rooms were a bit smaller, and there was sometimes a bit of noise outside. It didn't keep us up, but others may be bothered by it. Front desk was very helpful, and they greeted us with wine and pastries! Breakfast was only okay. Totally fine for a quick bite before tours, but we sometimes opted to venture off for a coffee at a cafe somewhere else.

We had a lot of fun doing this on our first night! Only thing that could have been better is if we had known what all of the tastings were going to be in advance. We started out finishing the wine they provided at the first stop only to find out there were ~4 more glasses of wine coming!

We loved walking the city with a private guide. Meant we got to break for a while and sit at a cafe while hearing about life in Porto. He also adapted the tour so we could end at the book shop we wanted to see! Walking tour was especially great in Porto because we really felt like we saw all of the city highlights. We ended up taking the guide's recommendation and taking an uber/spending the rest of the day along the beach starting at Praia da Luz and walking toward Matosinhos. So many fun beachfront restaurants for drinks and food!

Really beautiful, just wished we had gotten to do more hiking rather than jumping in and out of the car at the lookout points!

We really liked this day - we requested that we start with a hike so we did a ~2 hour walk around the whole body of water which meant we could take in the beautiful scenery!

We had lots of fun making the delicious food, but be warned that this was supposed to take 3 hours and ended up being a 6 hour activity instead! That being said, the market visit was great and was basically a tasting before the whole thing started. We just wish we had known how long everything was going to take!

We had lots of fun, and this was our last day of vacation! Be warned that the guide will not come into Pena Palace with you, so if you want to learn more about the rooms while you're walking through, you need to make sure you either have a guide inside or download an audio app for a self-guided tour. This didn't end up taking away from our experience, but we didn't realize that other groups would have tour guides leading them, so we were a little taken aback at first. As we kept walking though, we didn't feel like we really needed it. The town of Sintra was also very cute. We wish we had just been able to get lunch there rather than the designated spot which was tasty, but was essentially a food truck in a parking lot. Cascais was also gorgeous, and we probably could have spent a full day there lounging at the beach instead of just a few hours!