How to Spend 3 Days in Porto

This January, my sisters and I took a week-long trip to Portugal together. Our first half of the trip was in Porto, Portugal, which we loved as a starting place. For us, 3 days in Porto was the perfect amount of time to explore the city and nearby wine region.

When choosing how we wanted to spend our 3 days in Porto, we all looked to our favorite travel sites and combined everything we found into Google Sheets. Some of my favorite recommendations came from Well Traveled and Wild Terrains, so I recommend checking them out if you are planning a trip.

Day 1

Our first day of our trip, we landed in Lisbon and went straight to the train station to head up to Porto. We arrived in Porto around 2pm and checked into our hotel, The Sheraton Porto Hotel & Spa.

After getting settled in, we went down to the riverfront area of the city to explore and find some dinner. To be honest, it wasn’t our favorite part of town, but we did find a decent restaurant for dinner, and were more so impressed by the price of the meal since we weren’t expecting the city to be as cheap as it was.

Day 2

The second day of our trip happened to be my sister, Jacki’s 30th birthday. To celebrate, we took a day trip to the Duoro Valley wine region.

Our tour guide, Bruno, picked us up in downtown Porto in the morning before driving us out to the wine region. Bruno chatted with us the whole drive, filling us in on Portuguese culture, food, wine, the city of Porto and more.

Our first stop on the wine tour was a more industrialized winery, Quinta da Pacheca. After getting a full tour of the vineyard, we went to their tasting room to try their different wines and port. Bruno was even kind enough to go and get us some pasteis de nata to pair with one of the ports (a combo I highly recommend).

Next up, we headed down to the river for a boat tour and a charcuterie board. Our boat tour lasted about an hour and from the river we got a whole new vantage point of the wine region, seeing multiple vineyards along with farms built into the hillsides.

After filling up on port and our charcuterie board (which was amazing btw), Bruno drove us to our next vineyard, a small family-run operation, where we were treated to a huge Portuguese lunch pairing. Some of our favorite foods from the meal included a chickpea salad and Chouriço à Bombeiro (aka fire-roasted sausage).

Before we left, Bruno took us on a quick walk around the grounds of the family’s vineyard, showing us all of the vines and where they keep their sparkling wine that is aging in underground tunnels (similar to Champagne).

And with that, we drove back to Porto, exhausted from our jet lag kicking in and incredibly full. Bruno dropped us off at our meeting spot downtown and was kind enough to send us a huge list of all his recommendations for us in both Porto and Lisbon. We then went back to our hotel to hang out, plan out our next day, and continue to celebrate Jacki’s birthday.

Day 3

For our 3rd day in Porto, we decided to take ourselves on our food tour with sightseeing in between. We created our list of stops based on Bruno’s recommendations and some of the places we had bookmarked. You can find the full tour we made in this article I wrote for Well Traveled.

After recovering from our food coma, we found a small tapas place for dinner, Taberna Folias de Baco, that ended up being one of our favorite meals. I seriously can’t stop thinking about the tapas and have tried to recreate some at home (coming to the blog soon).

While there is definitely more to explore, 3 days in Porto was a perfect amount of time for us to fit everything in that we wanted to and to still have enough time to head down to Lisbon to finish our week (more to come on that part of the trip!).

If you want to information on everywhere we went in Portugal, you can find my list on the Out of Office app or on Well Traveled.

This post is not sponsored. Any links posted are for places/products that I love and I hope you do too!

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