There are numerous beaches you can reach from Porto by public transportation within an hour. What the best one is, depends on what your priorities for a day at the beach are. Here’s my list of the top beaches for different moods.

One more thing before I start: Porto is next to the Atlantic, which means the water is freezing. It never gets warmer than 17°C and there might be some bigger waves, which is great for surfing but not so much for swimming.

Every list of recommended day trips from Porto I could find contained a day trip to Braga, the third most populated urban area in Portugal.

When I visited, the city itself was very quiet. There were almost no tourists compared to other day trips from Porto. Though that might have been because of the 37°C heat (in Porto it was only about 28°C on that day).

Guimarães is considered the birthplace of Portugal and its historic town centre is considered a UNESCO World Heritage Site. So of course a lot of people do a day trip from Porto to Guimarães. I still expected a charming, small, quiet town after reading up on it. Well, it’s definitely charming and it’s small in the sense that all the sights are easily accessible by foot (except the viewpoint on a hill) but it’s definitely not quiet. I think it was the most touristy of all my day trips from Porto. But as usual, there’s a reason why there’re a lot of tourists, it’s a fantastic place to visit. The day trip from Porto to Guimarães was my favourite one.

Aveiro’s a nice, smallish, almost coastal town south of Porto that’s easily accessible by train. There are no specific must-see sights to look at, in my opinion. So the question arises: Is Aveiro worth visiting?

A day trip to Aveiro is great if you want to experience a different vibe but you’re not too keen on sightseeing. You can just enjoy the flair of the city while strolling through the historic centre of the town.

After taking in the town you can take a bus to Costa Nova and admire the colourful houses next to the coast and chill at the beach. As I said, a perfect day trip 😉

The first time I heard about Coimbra was when I got a board game with the same name. This deck-building game with its many scholarly characters is based on the UNESCO world heritage university city of Coimbra in Portugal. At the time it didn’t even occur to me to look more into the city. When I spent some time in Porto however and realised Coimbra is so close, I knew I had to do a day trip to the city. In this article, I’m gonna try to answer the question: Is Coimbra worth visiting?

There are quite a few really nice day trips from Porto you can do by public transportation. Most take a little over an hour to get there. What the best day trip from Porto is for you depends of course on what you’re in the mood for. I’ve listed the perfect trips for different mindsets in this article.