Reviews for Fodor's See It Portugal

The average rating for Fodor's See It Portugal based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-07-23 00:00:00 William Reeb A walking guide with 50 walks in Madeira and Porto Santo. The walks we have visited were along beautiful places and we really enjoyed walking them. The instructions are clear, and even though we felt unsure occasionally, we never had to backtrack and never actually got lost. Though there are a couple of gotchas that are not mentioned on the cover. The walking instructions are very detailed and precise and you can easily get along just with the text and the schematic maps in the book. However, you will absolutely need a good hiking map of the island to find the start points of the routes, since many of them were in villages too small for our GPS (Sygic, no idea what map source they use) and even for Google maps. The starts and ends are in general on bus stops and the guide provides bus route numbers, but many of the stops are simply in the countryside and you need to be well prepared to know where exactly to get off. The other thing that you have to keep in mind is that many of the tracks in the guide are linear. This makes it difficult to use a car to get to the start/end. As I've mentioned, you can use buses to get to the start and back from the end, but many of these buses go only a couple of times per day (even less during the weekend), and most of them start from Funchal. If you don't want to move to a new hotel/apartment each time, you should definitely stay in Funchal, close to the bus stops, but getting to all places will be difficult in any case. Luckily, it is often possible to combine two trails or find a different way back to the starting point with the use of the hiking map, but be prepared for much longer walks. This is what we did in the end, and we were able to visit most of the places (even though we had to adapt the routes sometimes). Next time we go to Madeira, we'll pack as lightly as possible and we will just find a place to sleep wherever we will find ourselves in the evening. In general, I can only recommend this guide, but it is important to keep in mind the limitations and make a walking plan properly in advance.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-11-21 00:00:00 Lee Hoyle This is like having a little tourist information office in your pocket. We were over in Lisbon for two and a half days, had lots of things we wanted to do, so it was really handy to have all the information so we could crack on and do what we wanted to do and not need time to figure everything out. The street maps are really good - we like to wander a lot - and there are maps of the metro, and all the bus and tram lines. Advice on travel tickets, getting about and all that. It's the Top Ten of everything, so no doubt there are lots of little gems missing that you wouldn't see anyway unless you were there for a time. Nothing is in detail, so this is a mini version of the big DK guides with lots of lush photos and much details, but for getting through the essentials, this was all we needed.