Bagpacking Portugal

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This summer I bagpacked a few cities of Portugal with a friend. I always thought that it was a bit shameful that I have been living in Spain but I have never visited our neighbors.

So during the summer holidays I decided that it was the time. I planned a backpacking trip from south Portugal to north Portugal.

It all started in Sevilla. We flew to Sevilla in the early morning and spent all day visiting to city before taking a bus to Faro. The bus took around three hours and it was really cheap.

If I had known the state in which Faro was I would have automatically skipped the city... The city looks abandoned and there isn't much to do, despite the fact that it is the actual capital of the Algarve region.
I noticed that the food and other basic supplies were pretty expensive and that there were not many Portuguese banks (almost all the banks were foreign banks, and this was confirmed by the hostel owner. He said that since the economic crisis all the Algarve region went downhill, specially the capital, and that now that all banks were foreing banks, all the algarvians had to pay extra when getting cash from these ATMs).

After hearing these news we weren't hoping much from Lagos, but we were surprised to see the difference. There is so much tourism in Lagos and so many activities for tourists that it has grown much more active than the capital. In fact we stayed two nights over there and enjoyed surfing and kayaking on the magnificent algarvian coast (by the way, the water was very, very cold).

After spending these days in Lagos we headed north to Lisboa. Lisboa was indeed very beautiful but I didn't like the fact that it is full of hills which means that you have to walk a lot, or practically climb... We visited Lisboa most famous neighborhoods, ate good pasteis de nata near plaza Camões and went to have a look at the Belém tower. What I really liked was our trip to Sintra. It really deserves the label of UNESCO world heritage. I specially liked the templar poço iniciático. We also tried the queijadas!

We enjoyed our stay in both Lisboa and Sintra and headed north to our last city: Oporto.
Oporto was a charming little city and we loved walking near the river and partying at the galerías. We also spent one afternoon visiting Aveiro (they call it the portuguese Venice, although I disagree very much with this name...) and another afternoon near Matosinhos beach, where we ate in a restaurant that served very good fish.

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Comments

[Ake Och Emma]

Portugal is a white spot on our map
We haven't really seen anything of Portugal. Nice to read a bit about it. /Ake