SenorBeef, I just wanted to say that it’s been really fun to read about your Iberian trip. You have little observational details all along the easy-going general narrative that I really like.
I appreciate that, I wasn’t sure if anyone was interested in my trip report.
Went through Lisbon today without doing much. I pretty much drove through it aimlessly for a while to get a feel for the city and walked a couple of streets. Lisbon is big but doesn’t feel like any of the Spanish cities. It doesn’t, as far as I saw, have the really nice pedestrian districts where restaurants and businesses were concentrated in somewhere like Madrid or Barcelona. It was closer to an American city with less old town and more modern roads, but not quite like an American city either. It was relatively easy to navigate compared to a Spanish city, but didn’t have much of the historical architecture or the pedestrian friendly zones. It kind of lacked much personality.
It was also much higher traffic than anywhere else I’d driven, but keep in mind that I didn’t have a car in Madrid or Barcelona. Still, while everything in southern Spain and the Algarve was always low traffic, Lisbon’s freeways were always backed up a decent bit.
If I did move to Portugal I don’t think I would want to live in Lisbon and so I didn’t spend too much time on it. I did drive around the surrounding. Suburbs. I stayed near Cascais and it was quite a bit nicer. The city center felt, again, pretty touristy and very British – Portugal feels crowded with Brits whereas even the Costa Del Sol wasn’t so Brits dominated. Cascais had some absolutely beautiful streets going through the city with tons of trees and nice pedestrian walkways and yet… no street side restaurants with outdoor seating like you find everywhere in Spain. It was basically the perfect spot for it, and there were restaurants, but they were interior only. I don’t know if I saw a single patio on some beautiful stretches of road. Seems like a huge waste. The centro area of Cascais did have plenty of outdoor seating though.
In general, the eating out experience has been very frustrating in Portugal compared to Spain. My experience in Spain was amazing. You could pick any city block at random and there would be at least 4 high quality, cheap restaurants with a good atmosphere and generally very nice outdoor dining. I never had a bad meal in Spain and I never had trouble finding one either. And they almost always seemed like good value. But Portugal has been… Challenging. Every cost of living site says it’s cheaper to eat out in Portugal, but my experience has been the opposite. Portugal prices are 20-30% higher. You could always get full on 20 euros in Spain, but in Portugal it seems like most main plates alone run 25+.
I feel like I’m doing something wrong. Sure, I’ve been to some touristy places, but I was in touristy places in Spain, too. I’ve looked at dozens of menus in each place on Google maps and it’s just hard to get cheap food in Portugal. I don’t know wtf I’m doing wrong.
And restaurants in Portugal don’t keep the hours they list. My second night in Portugal was a Saturday night and I decided to walk from my hotel to a well rated restaurant a 5 minute walk away. It was about 10pm and this place was listed as being open till 2am. It was closed. So I walked 5 minutes to the next closest place, it was listed as closing at midnight, also closed. So went back to get my car, went to another nearby place, also midnight, closed. WTF? I had to go to my 4th restaurant to find one that was open. And I don’t even mean like closing a half hour early, some of them were closed and dark 2+ hours before their listed closing time.
Tonight I got to central Cascais around 9:40. I went to a restaurant that said it closed at 11 – I was told they were closed though people were eating. Walked to the next one, also listed closing time at 11, got there at 9:50 – they were putting up all the chairs and closing. Walked to another one that was open till 2am – kitchen was closed. Walked to another that was listed as being open till 12:30 (got there about 10:30), closed. I’m in the middle of the central restaurant district in a fairly large city and I can’t find a place to eat at 10:30.
I get that they’re not late night people like the Spanish, but why list hours you’re not going to be open? If this happened once or twice that would be a fluke, but it happened like, what, 7 out of 8 times?
They really aren’t late night people like the Spanish are. When I was driving around between 10 and 11 on a Saturday night in Lagos the roads were practically empty. No one was walking the streets, no one dining outdoors, most of the restaurants are closed. In Spain, you’d see little kids playing in the streets at like 12:30, but in Portugal everyone is apparently at home by 9:30 on a Saturday night.
These may seem like minor complaints but eating out is one of my favorite things to do and it was so great in Spain that I’m kind of baffled at how frustrating and expensive it is in Portugal.
Sorry Cascais has let you down. I was meh about Faro and Lisbon as well, but really dug Cascais. But we had a place right on the beach and I think the only meal that wowed me was a smash burger. I think you will find Porto to be more to your liking. The architecture is more diverse (Lisbon was wiped out by an earthquake and rebuilt in one style) and the food was as good -and affordable - as the wine. On your way north there is the surfing Mecca of Nazare. Wrong time of the year for 50 foot waves, but the small town there is charming and we ate a lot of fresh fish in the restaurants there.
Sorry, I ended up going on a bit of a rant there after I wasted over an hour trying to find something to eat. It’s something that happened to me in several places in Portugal, I just happened to rant about it after my day in Cascais. I’m totally cool with weird hours (some places in Portugal close during the afternoon like in Spain but not nearly as many), with the culture that’s way more laid back about work, but closing 1-3 hours before your listed time bugs me because you waste your time going somewhere.
Cascais has nice shoreline with lots of places to watch the sea (though this part of Portugal is short on beaches, mostly cliffs), a nice centro with lots of restaurants, and the main streets through town are very nice to both drive and walk. Great landscaping, lots of trees. I would definitely give some consideration to living here. It’s a sort of medium density you don’t find often in Spain. It’s still more dense than a US suburb where there are endless side streets with single unit houses with big yards, but most of it is not a high density urban area like even small towns tends to be in Spain – leaves more room for roads and parking. They don’t really have places in the Iberian peninsula that the US would recognize as suburbs.
I think I’m being harsher on Portugal than I would’ve been if I came here before I went to Spain. Spain set the bar very high.