Best Things to Do in Portugal

Lisbon: Trams, Tiles and Fado

Lisbon is built across seven hills above the Tagus River estuary, and almost everything memorable about getting around the city involves climbing, descending, or being hauled up a gradient by something mechanical. The most famous of these mechanical helpers is Tram 28, the city's iconic yellow streetcar, which has run a fixed route through Lisbon's oldest quarters since the early twentieth century.

Ride Tram 28 Through the Alfama

Tram 28 winds from Martim Moniz through Graça, the Alfama, the Baixa and into Estrela — a roughly 45-minute, six-kilometre route that climbs gradients steep enough that the tram's narrow-gauge carriages were specifically designed for Lisbon's hills. The Alfama, the oldest surviving district in the city, predates the catastrophic 1755 earthquake that flattened most of central Lisbon, which is why its street layout still follows a medieval, almost Moorish logic of narrow lanes and sudden staircases rather than the grid-planned Baixa district that was rebuilt below it. Ride the tram early in the morning or accept that you will be sharing the carriage with a great many other people doing exactly the same thing — Tram 28 is, by a wide margin, Lisbon's most popular tourist experience, and pickpocketing on the route is common enough that bags should be kept in front of you, not slung over a shoulder.

Watch Fado in a Small Lisbon Tavern

Fado is Portugal's signature musical tradition — a melancholic, often improvised style built around the concept of saudade, a word that resists direct translation but roughly describes a longing for something or someone absent, tinged with the knowledge it may never return. Fado emerged in Lisbon's working-class neighbourhoods, particularly the Alfama and Mouraria districts, in the early nineteenth century, and UNESCO inscribed it on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2011. The most authentic performances happen in small, family-run casas de fado rather than the larger tourist-oriented venues — look for places where locals are also dining, where the singer performs unamplified, and where the room falls properly silent during the song, which is considered a mark of respect for the performer.

Explore the Baixa, Chiado and Belém Districts

The Baixa is Lisbon's flat, grid-planned downtown, rebuilt under the direction of the Marquis of Pombal after the 1755 earthquake and tsunami destroyed most of the city centre — one of the earliest examples of seismically-conscious urban planning anywhere in the world. A short tram or train ride west, the riverside district of Belém holds two of Portugal's most significant monuments: the Jerónimos Monastery, a UNESCO World Heritage Site built to commemorate Vasco da Gama's 1498 sea route to India, and the Belém Tower, a fortified watchtower that once marked the ceremonial gateway for ships departing on Portugal's Age of Discoveries voyages. Belém is also home to the original Pastéis de Belém bakery, which has produced its custard tarts to a closely guarded recipe since 1837 — worth the queue, and worth comparing against the more generic pastel de nata sold elsewhere in the city.

Porto: Port Wine and the Ribeira

Porto sits where the Douro River meets the Atlantic, and the entire identity of the city — including its name, which gave rise to the country's name — is bound up with the fortified wine produced upstream and aged in cellars on the river's southern bank.

Walk the Ribeira District

The Ribeira is Porto's UNESCO World Heritage-listed riverside quarter — a tangle of brightly painted, narrow townhouses stacked up the hillside above the Douro, connected by stairways, archways and the occasional vertigo-inducing balcony. It is one of the oldest urban landscapes in Portugal, and one of the most photographed in the country, particularly from across the river or from the upper deck of the Dom Luís I Bridge, an iron double-decker bridge completed in 1886 by a former student of Gustave Eiffel.

Tour the Port Wine Cellars of Vila Nova de Gaia

Directly across the river from the Ribeira sits Vila Nova de Gaia, home to the historic port wine houses — Taylor's, Graham's, Sandeman, Calém and dozens more — whose cellars have aged port in oak barrels since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when British merchants began fortifying Douro wine with brandy to survive the sea voyage home. A cellar tour typically includes an explanation of the difference between Tawny, Ruby and Vintage port, a walk through barrel rooms that can smell more like a library than a winery, and a tasting that makes the historical context considerably easier to absorb. Several houses also offer rooftop terraces with views back across the river to the Ribeira — worth timing for late afternoon light.

Sintra: Palaces in the Hills

Less than an hour from central Lisbon by train, Sintra is a UNESCO World Heritage Cultural Landscape — an entire forested mountain range dotted with nineteenth-century Romanticist palaces, mystical gardens and one of the best-preserved Moorish castles in the Iberian Peninsula.

Visit Pena Palace

Pena Palace is Portugal's most photographed building outside Lisbon — a riot of yellow, red and grey towers, domes and crenellations built in the 1840s for King Ferdinand II in a deliberately eclectic Romanticist style that borrows from Gothic, Manueline, Moorish and Renaissance architecture all at once. It sits atop one of the highest points in the Sintra hills, and on clear days the views extend to the Atlantic coastline. Visit early or pre-book timed entry tickets — Pena Palace is consistently the most visited paid attraction in Portugal, and queues by mid-morning can run well over an hour.

Descend Into Quinta da Regaleira

Quinta da Regaleira is stranger and, to many visitors, more memorable than Pena Palace itself. Built in the early twentieth century for a wealthy collector with a fascination for alchemy, Freemasonry and the Knights Templar, the estate's gardens conceal a network of grottoes, wells and tunnels — most famously the Initiation Well, a spiral staircase descending nearly 30 metres underground, lined with Masonic and Tarot symbolism, that was never used as an actual well at all.

The Douro Valley: Portugal's Wine Country

The Douro Valley, roughly two hours east of Porto by road or rail, is the world's oldest demarcated wine region, officially regulated since 1756 — predating France's Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée system by well over a century. The valley's steep, terraced vineyards, carved into schist hillsides above the Douro River, produce both the grapes for port wine and an increasingly well-regarded range of still Douro red and white wines.

A Douro river cruise is the most relaxed way to take in the terraced landscape, but the valley also rewards a slower, overnight visit — many of the historic quintas (wine estates) offer accommodation, tastings and harvest-season grape treading in the traditional stone lagares, typically during the September harvest. The hillside town of Pinhão, with its azulejo-tiled railway station depicting traditional Douro harvest scenes, makes a good base for exploring individual estates by car or organised tour.

The Algarve: Sea Caves and Golden Cliffs

Portugal's southernmost region is best known internationally for its beaches, but the Algarve's defining feature is geological: a long stretch of golden limestone cliffs, eroded by the Atlantic into a labyrinth of grottoes, arches and sea caves found nowhere else in such concentration in Western Europe.

Explore Benagil Cave

Benagil Cave, near Lagoa, is the Algarve's most famous sea cave — a domed chamber with a circular skylight open to the sky, accessible only by boat, kayak, paddleboard or a (genuinely difficult and occasionally dangerous) swim from the adjacent beach. The cave can only be reached at certain tides and is not safe to enter during rough seas; guided boat or kayak tours from Benagil, Albufeira or Lagos are the most reliable and least risky way to see it properly.

Discover the Wider Cave Coastline

Benagil is the most photographed cave, but it's far from the only one — the coastline between Lagos and Albufeira holds dozens of smaller grottoes, the dramatic rock arches of Ponta da Piedade near Lagos, and the secluded cove beaches that the Algarve's interior road network mostly bypasses entirely, meaning many are reachable only by boat or a scramble down a cliff path.

Nazaré: Home to the World's Biggest Waves

Nazaré is, on the surface, an unremarkable fishing town on Portugal's central coast. Underneath it, a different story: the Nazaré Canyon, an underwater chasm plunging to roughly 5,000 metres just offshore, funnels and amplifies incoming Atlantic swells into some of the largest waves ever recorded breaking near a coastline.

The big-wave season runs roughly October through March, when North Atlantic storm systems push the largest swells toward the Portuguese coast. Watching from the cliffside lighthouse at Praia do Norte during a major swell is, by some distance, the most dramatic free spectator experience in Portugal — and considerably safer than what the surfers themselves are doing a few hundred metres offshore. Outside big-wave season, Praia da Nazaré, the calmer main town beach, is a perfectly ordinary and pleasant spot for swimming.

Óbidos and Portugal's Medieval Towns

An hour north of Lisbon, Óbidos is a fully walled medieval town that has changed remarkably little since the thirteenth century, when it was given as a wedding gift to successive Portuguese queens — a tradition that continued for nearly 500 years. Its cobbled main street, lined with whitewashed houses with the region's characteristic blue and yellow trim, leads up to a restored castle (now partly a luxury inn) with walls that can be walked in their entirety for views over the surrounding countryside and, on a clear day, the Lagoa de Óbidos lagoon toward the coast.

When to Visit Portugal

Portugal's Atlantic-moderated climate makes it a viable destination in any season, but each part of the year suits a different kind of trip.

Getting Around Portugal

Portugal's compact size makes it one of the easier countries in Western Europe to cover without a rigid itinerary. High-speed and regional trains connect Lisbon and Porto efficiently (the journey takes around three hours), and Sintra is a straightforward suburban train trip from central Lisbon. The Algarve and the Douro Valley are both more comfortably explored with a hire car or a guided tour, since public transport thins out considerably once away from the main Lisbon–Porto corridor. Domestic flights exist between Lisbon and the Algarve's Faro Airport but are rarely necessary given the relatively short driving distances involved.

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