We are heading to Portugal at the end of July (no flexibility on dates). Will have 6 year old kids with us.
Rough itinerary is -
Land in Lisbon from NYC : 4 nights
Drive to Algarve: 4 nights
Fly to Porto, 3 nights there and fly back to NYC
A few open questions
Do we cut Lisbon to 3 nights and add another night in Algarve
Algarve to Porto: there is only Ryanair and their timing isn’t convenient - it’s either 7:50am or 5:30pm. It’s 325 miles/ 5.5 hours drive and didn’t want to spend that long on the road.
Just want to make sure we are not over-doing it. It would be great to get any inputs on the itinerary.
Given it’s July, and likely uncomfortably hot, I’d suggest giving serious thought to dropping a location and giving the extra days to the Algarve (which whilst every bit as hot, is more conducive to enjoying that).
I wouldn’t drop any location. We did Lisbon and Porto in April of 2023. Really enjoyed it. I would say three days in each is solid. I think we actually did 3 nights in Lisbon, 2 nights in Porto, and then 4 nights in Paris.
We drove from Lisbon to Porto. I found the driving to be very easy. Maybe this was my experience, but the actual process of picking up the car that I reserved from Hertz in Lisbon took forever. Drove from Lisbon to Porto with quick stops in Nazare and Coimbra (to visit the library, I probably wouldn’t do that with 6 year olds).
My wife (or as I like to call her, my ex-girlfriend) went to Portugal in 2022. Lisbon was quite nice but we only had two nights and it was plenty enough for us. We both loved the Algarve and in retrospect wish we had spent more time there. I love beaches and coastline. I really loved going to lots of different beaches, exploring the rocks and caves and whatever else each location had to offer. I could have spent three days doing that alone. One splurge for us was to hire a boat to tour us around the coastline. We had a skipper and a steward and we were able to explain what we wanted to see/do at the time of booking. We left from a marina in Lagos and went as far east as Benagil cave, then we worked our way back west, pulling into some caves with the boat or pulling closer in or further away from the coast to take pictures. They took us to a beautiful spot where we hopped out and swam for a while. Then they had an inflatable kayak and put a picnic lunch on it for us and we paddled to a private beach to eat. Now I am admittedly biased because this is the lunch/beach where I proposed and so we were on cloud nine for the whole day, but it’s a trip that I wouldn’t mind repeating because it was so great. We also did one little small, quick trip on a boat with other tourists in Lagos that just went out for maybe 20-30 minutes through some grottos and obviously this was a much cheaper boat trip, but we loved it too. I’d like to go back and do every cave/grotto viewing opportunity big or small and spend several days exploring beaches. Not knowing your kids at all, if you’re taking them there then I bet they’d love this stuff. I’ve got details of our trip saved away somewhere; if you’d like them then I’m sure I could dig them up. Enjoy your trip!
Personally, and especially since you are with younger kids I would rather go for just one city with two full days to explore and spend more time relaxing by the coast/beach with a few half or full day trips.
Haven’t been to Porto so wouldn’t know which better to drop but Lisbon is an interesting city.
Alternatively, you could base yourselves at a beach near Lisbon and head into the city only either 1st thing in the morning, or for an evening stroll / meal, or if by chance it’s a rainy day.
