Before we moved to Holland we made a list of places we wanted to visit - Switzerland, Iceland, Belgium, France, Portugal, to name a few - and made a brief outline of when we would visit them. We decided to do Portugal during the University's spring break, which was the beginning of February, so we could justify spending a full week exploring the country. We ended up pushing back the trip to early March in hopes of having nice, sunny weather, and decided to still keep the trip to a week because anything less didn't seem long enough. I spent about a week researching where to go and what to see, and the more I found the more excited I was. For me, Portugal isn't a very typical European destination - when I think of Europe I think of France or Italy or Germany or Spain - so I feel like it's often overlooked (but again, maybe that's just me). All this to say that Portugal is now my new favorite place in all of Europe. No joke. In the next few blog posts I hope to show you why it's so amazing and convince everyone to visit because it's seriously our favorite place in all of the world (so far :).
Our main goal of the trip was to explore some cool cities, enjoy the sun, and HIKE because we missed walking on land that isn't flat. By this time in our travels we have realized that we don't really like big cities - Paris was too overwhelming for us and we've found we get burnt out much quicker in a busy, crowded place. But we had heard amazing things about Portugal's cities, so we decided to spend a few short days in both Porto and Lisbon. If we could have done it again I would have given us an extra day in Lisbon because it was simply amazing, but we were still able to fit in a lot of the city in two days.
The Itinerary- 11 days driving from Porto to the Western Algarves:
- 3 nights in Porto
- 2 nights in Lousa, a random small town in between Porto and Lisbon which looked like it had cool hikes
- 1 night in Sintra
- 2 nights in Lisbon
- 2 nights in the Western Algarves
This turned out to be the perfect itinerary for us - seriously I don't know how it all worked out so perfectly- but every place we went and every thing we saw was amazing and I really wouldn't have done it any other way. We absolutely fell in love with Porto and the rugged, abandoned buildings, loved the beautiful hikes and gorgeous palace we stayed in Lousa, were blown away by the adorableness of Sintra and it's magical garden/castles/palace, became obsessed with Lisbon and the culture, food, views and vibe, and never wanted to leave the adorable farmhouse countryside escape we stayed in in the Algarves.
This week was my happy place.
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