Luxury hotel holidays to Portugal

Single-centre holidays

Choose from idyllic private resorts on Madeira, grand ocean-facing palaces, and majestic properties high in the mountains. This style of holiday enables in-depth and leisurely exploration of one particular region, be it the rolling countryside, the jagged mountains, or the sweeping coast.

Two-centre holidays

Combine two contrasting regions and spend a few nights in each; moving from a beach-side resort to a hotel hidden behind undulating hills. This style of holiday means you do not have to choose your favourite of Portugal's breath-taking landscapes. Why not combine a hotel on the Algarve with a hotel close to Lisbon? Or a hotel in the Douro Valley with Lisbon or Faro? Or perhaps even a hotel in Portugal with a resort in Madeira?

Multi-centre touring holidays

This is the style of holiday we most highly recommend at Expressions Holidays. Longer tours with multiple stops really allow you to explore and develop your knowledge of Portugal. Why not combine three or four of our hotels to make sure you see each of Portugal's main natural attractions in turn?

Portugal - Frequently Asked Questions

Most people think of Portugal as a beach holiday destination. What does an Expressions holiday offer that goes beyond that?

Portugal has one of the most varied and rewarding holiday landscapes in Europe, and the beach — fine as the beaches are — is genuinely the least interesting part of what the country offers. Lisbon is one of the great European capitals: a city of extraordinary light, layered history, outstanding food and a fado and contemporary music culture that is entirely its own. Porto, two and a half hours north by fast train, is a different proposition again — a compact, handsome city of baroque churches, tile-covered facades and some of the finest wine cellars in Europe, with the port lodges of Vila Nova de Gaia directly across the Douro. The Douro Valley itself, stretching east from Porto through terraced vineyards of extraordinary beauty, is one of the most dramatic wine landscapes in the world and has a set of exceptional hotels to match. Sintra, half an hour from Lisbon, has a concentration of royal palaces and forested hillsides that Byron called the most beautiful place on earth, and it retains that quality today. The Alentejo — the vast, quiet interior south of Lisbon — has a landscape of cork oak, olive groves and whitewashed villages, a food culture of genuine depth and one of the most talked-about new hotels in Europe in the Vermelho Melides, a design-led coastal retreat on the wild Atlantic coast. An Expressions holiday to Portugal starts with the question of what kind of experience you actually want, and then builds the right itinerary around that — which typically has very little to do with the Algarve.

Lisbon keeps appearing on best-city lists. Is it as good as its reputation, and which hotels do you recommend?

Lisbon earns its reputation and then some, and it is one of those cities that rewards being stayed in properly rather than rushed through. It is compact enough to walk — the seven hills, the tram lines, the miradouros with their views across the estuary — but has sufficient depth that three or four nights begins to feel like the right amount of time rather than too long. The Alfama, the oldest quarter, has Moorish roots, a castle on the hill and the fado houses where the music is played with the intensity it was written for; Belém to the west has the Jerónimos Monastery and the Monument to the Discoveries, the most tangible expression of Portugal's extraordinary age of exploration; the Baixa and Chiado neighbourhoods in between have some of the finest restaurants in the country. For hotels, the Pousada de Lisboa is our centrepiece recommendation: a five-star pousada in the magnificently restored Pombaline palace on the Praça do Comércio, with a position right on the waterfront that is quite simply one of the finest hotel addresses in Lisbon. For clients who want to combine Lisbon with Porto, we offer a six-night fly-rail touring holiday staying in pousadas in both cities, travelling between them by train — an extremely comfortable and scenic journey — and it is one of our most popular Portugal itineraries.

We have heard a lot about the Douro Valley and Porto. What is the best way to experience them, and which hotels are worth staying in?

Porto and the Douro Valley make an outstanding pairing and between them cover two quite different but complementary experiences. Porto itself is best approached as a walking city: the Ribeira waterfront, the port lodges across the river, the azulejo-tiled São Bento station, the baroque interior of the Igreja de São Francisco and the bookshop Livraria Lello — one of the most beautiful in the world — are all within easy reach of each other, and the city has a restaurant and wine bar scene that has improved enormously in recent years. The Yeatman Hotel in Vila Nova de Gaia, a five-star wine hotel on the hillside above the port lodges with spectacular views across the river to Porto, is our recommended base: the wine cellar and restaurant are exceptional and the hotel's wine immersion programme is one of the most thoughtful in Europe. The Douro Valley proper begins around an hour east of Porto, where the terraced vineyards rise steeply above the river and the quintas — the wine estates — produce port, Douro table wine and some of the finest olive oil in Portugal. The Six Senses Douro Valley is the outstanding address: a painstakingly restored nineteenth-century manor house with a world-class spa, an organic kitchen garden, and an interactive wine library; the quality of its vineyard views and the depth of the food and wine programme make it one of the finest hotels in Portugal. The Vintage House at Pinhão, right at the heart of the valley, is more intimate and more directly connected to the vineyards — the terrace overlooks the river where the rabelo boats used to carry the port barrels downstream. We offer a six-night fly-drive holiday combining Porto with the Douro Valley that works very well as a self-contained holiday or as the northern half of a wider Portugal itinerary.

We are interested in Sintra and the area around Lisbon — the palaces, the countryside, the Atlantic coast. How do you build a holiday around that?

The area within an hour of Lisbon is remarkably rich and makes an excellent base for a single-centre holiday or a first introduction to Portugal. Sintra is the essential starting point: a UNESCO World Heritage Site set in wooded hills above a string of royal palaces — the Palácio Nacional da Pena, the ruined Castelo dos Mouros, the romantically overgrown Quinta da Regaleira — and the Tivoli Palácio de Seteais, an eighteenth-century palace hotel on the hillside above the town, is one of the most beautiful places to stay in the whole of Portugal. Cascais, twenty minutes from Sintra along the coast, is a handsome former royal resort with good restaurants and easy Atlantic beaches, and the Pestana Cidadela Cascais — a boutique hotel built within the walls of a seventeenth-century citadel — combines history and comfort in exactly the right proportions for a short break. Further south down the coast from Lisbon, the Alentejo coast opens up into a wilder and less visited Atlantic landscape of empty beaches, sand dunes and fishing villages. The Vermelho Melides is the standout hotel here: a design-led retreat of considerable originality on the Atlantic coast near Melides, with a strong food philosophy rooted in the produce of the surrounding Alentejo plains and a sensibility that is quite unlike any other hotel in Portugal. It is not a resort in the conventional sense — there are no pools of sunloungers — but for clients who want beauty, seclusion, outstanding food and a genuinely different Portugal experience, it is one of the most exciting addresses we feature.

We have been to Portugal before and stayed in the Algarve. What would you suggest for a return visit that takes us somewhere new?

The Algarve is a fine holiday and we would never say otherwise — it has some genuinely excellent hotels and the golf is outstanding — but a return visit to Portugal is an excellent opportunity to experience a quite different country from the one most British visitors see. Our strongest suggestion for returning clients is the Douro Valley combined with Porto: this is the part of Portugal that rewards people who already have some feel for the country and want to go deeper into its wine culture and landscape, and the combination of a city hotel in Porto with three or four nights at the Six Senses or the Vintage House in the valley gives a holiday that is entirely unlike an Algarve stay in character. Lisbon is another natural next step, particularly for clients who have not spent time there: two or three nights in the city — ideally at the Pousada de Lisboa on the waterfront — followed by a day or two in Sintra makes for a very complete short break. For clients who want something quieter and more off the beaten track, the Alentejo interior — the plains, the whitewashed towns, the ancient cork forests — is the least visited and most characteristically Portuguese part of the country south of Lisbon, and increasingly it has the hotels to match. However you want to approach it, we will find the right combination: Portugal is a country that repays multiple visits, and the best version of a return trip is almost never back to the same place.