The new year started as a fresh new page.

A trip to Portugal to take a moment of rest and get in balance again. During our trip in Portugal, there was plenty of time to rethink of what has gone by last year and list down what we would like to improve or to achieve in the new year.

We started our trip with a visit to Lissabon city, capital of Portugal. Plan was to celebrate New Year’s Eve and see the fireworks in the capital, then to hit the road with a rental car.

Lissabon city must have been very impressive in the past, there are beautiful old impressive buildings decorated with Portugese traditional coloured tiles. Unfortunately the buildings and streets are not well kept. From the taxi driver, we understood that most people live outside of the city. The city now is mainly used by hotels, offices and tourists.

Nevertheless, Lisbon city is really a city worth visiting. The city centre is very unique, different from other world cities I have visited. We ourselves stayed four nights in Lisbon city. We can recommend that you book a hotel outside Lisbon city and take an Uber from there to visit the city center. The hotels in Portugal are very expensive. The Uber trips were affordable. One or two days to visit the city center is more than enough to stroll around.

Our road trip then leads us to Sintra, where the colorful Pena Palace Sintra is located. We can recommend a visit to this beautiful castle. It is best to visit the castle outside the holiday period and as early as possible in the day. According to the locals, Sintra is much too busy during the holiday periods. Luckily we didn’t experience that during our visit. Early January is therefore a very good time to visit Sintra.

Portugal’s roads are well maintained and there were hardly any traffic jams during our road trip. We could easily drive from one place to another and chose to do a loop around the coastline. We went from Sintra to the most easterly point of Europe “Ponta Mais Occidental do Continente Europe’s”, further down to the luxurious Cascais, over the bridge down to the beaches of “Praia da Fonte da Telha, Prado do Potacho, Sagres, Lagos, Praia dos Tres Irmaos, Rei das praias, Marinha Beach up to Faro.

Food 🙂

There was even time to visit Spain for some days 🙂

We definitely recommend a visit to Portugal; the people are friendly, the food is really good and the prices are affordable. Portugal is certainly a good destination to visit, during the cold period in the north.