Title: Rick Steves Portugal Pdf
Author: Rick Steves
Published Date: 2017-04-18
Page: 370
Tour Lisbon's cobbled lanes, cruise the Douro River, and soak up the sun on Algarve beaches: with Rick Steves on your side, Portugal can be yours!
Inside Rick Steves Portugal you'll find:
- Comprehensive coverage for spending a week or more exploring Portugal
- Rick's strategic advice on how to get the most out of your time and money, with rankings of his must-see favorites
- Top sights and hidden gems, from the the bone chapel of Évora and the palaces of Sintra to seaside street food and lush vineyards
- How to connect with culture: Chat with locals in charming small towns, enjoy a dinner of fresh seafood stew, or spend an evening at a bluesy fado bar
- Beat the crowds, skip the lines, and avoid tourist traps with Rick's candid, humorous insight
- The best places to eat, sleep, and relax with a glass of local port
- Self-guided walking tours of lively neighborhoods and incredible museums
- Detailed maps for exploring on the go
- Useful resources including a packing list, a Portuguese phrase book, a historical overview, and recommended reading
- Over 400 bible-thin pages include everything worth seeing without weighing you down
- Complete, up-to-date information on Lisbon, Sintra, Salema, Cape Sagres, Lagos, Tavira, Évora, Nazaré, Batalha, Fátima, Alcobaça, Óbidos, Coimbra, Porto, Peso de Régua, Pinhão, and more
selective or subjective? This review is based on my experiences on a family trip to Portugal in August, 2018 compared to the descriptions in the ninth edition of this guidebook. We toured extensively in Lisbon and the Algarve, but cannot comment on the other areas.I became a fan of the Rick Steves franchise based on his previous books Mona Winks and Europe 101. I found their selective focus helpful in making the most of limited time with overwhelming choices. In this guide to Portugal, I found this very selectivity to be at times misleading. For example, there was the characterization of certain towns as having a “sleepy fishing village” vibe, with Salema and Nazaré singled out in particular. I understand that there is a time lag between research and book publication, but this is not how I would presently describe these towns, or anywhere along the Algarve from what we saw, with the arguable exception of Sagres. At least not in peak season. There is wall-to-wall development. The only area of unspoiled, natural seascapes we found were in the Aljezur region on the southwest coast, which is not mentioned at all in this guidebook.The selectivity here can even veer into snobbery, which is ironic for a guidebook series that targets middle class or budget travellers. Like most people we know who visited the area, we stayed at a hotel in the mid-region of the Algarve, in our case Praia da Rocha. Not only is this area not covered in the book, it is unhelpfully labelled on a map as “the worst of the Algarve”. It’s true that the beaches were well-maintained and therefore popular, and there was an abundance of restaurants and services. This is not my idea of a bad thing, and from what we saw did not differ significantly from other resort areas favoured in the text. In fact the highlight of our trip, a boat tour of coastal caves and beaches, was right in this omitted area. This made me wistful for not having consulted one of the “F word” guidebooks. At least they don’t have blackout zones!The section on Lisbon had the reliable, concise detail I was expecting, and I would recommend the snapshot volume from this series if you were to focus your visit there. Even then, I found some of the supposedly personal restaurant recommendations suspect, as the sheer volume of competition in price, food, and service seemed to level out the choices in the touristy areas. You could just randomly pick a location and not be disappointed. Another strong point was the self-guided walking tour directions, but again the particular food and store recommendations seemed arbitrary. For that, and the generally accurate and helpful cultural information, four stars.Big Rick Steves fan but was disappointed with this one Rick Steves is always my go to source when we go to Europe. We really follow his advice and visit a lot of his recommendations. We preordered the latest edition of his Portugal guide as it was being released a month before our trip. We were disappointed a few times. Sometimes, it was a restaurant recommendation that missed the mark but the times that were most disappointing was missing information. We had to figure out how to get between some of the cities we were visiting because it wasn't in the book. Typically, the Rick Steves book would tell you the best form of transportation, which station, and where/how to buy your tickets. That was not always the case in this guide. Even chapters that provided that weren't as specific as usual. It seemed as if Portugal perhaps has not been as familiar to the writers as other countries.Not up to par I always buy Rick Steves because he does provide some good information, but this one is lacking. He really doesn't cover a great deal of what to do and see in Portugal - he just hits the highly popular areas. His suggestions for transportation were lacking and I didn't much care for the maps. His books are sometimes oddly laid-out - I wound up tossing one into the trash in Italy because I got tired of flipping back and forth looking for things that were not in the place one would think they'd be. I doubt I'll take this book with me as most of the places I'll be going aren't in the book, but it's been an interesting, if limited, read before I embark on my trip. I may just stick with Lonely Planet from now on.
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