In June 2019 my boyfriend and I wanted to visit Portugal, as it is only 2 hours from Sevilla. So we made a plan, hired a car, booked hotels and we were off!

What to expect in this article:

Sleeping in a boat

On Friday evening we got our car (which we booked from Amovens) and drove 2 hours to Olhão. From Olhão we took the boat to the island of Culatra, because our hosts were waiting there for us. We were about to do something special, which none of us had done before, we would go sleep on a boat!

We saw that this was possible on Airbnb and it was not expensive (50 euros for 1 night).
I actually wrote about this before, so for more information, go to this post.

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Olhão

The next morning we left early, but not without having breakfast with an amazing view!

We first went to explore a bit more of Olhão for half an hour. Olhão is such a nice town with a lot of paintings/graffiti. It´s actually the main port of the Algarve, which points out the reason we took had to take the boat there to Culatra island.

Faro

Then we were off to Faro. Our first big destination. It was great to just wander around and have our first experience with the Algarve region. Faro is quite colorful but also has old, medieval buildings, as you can see in the first picture. I have seen articles that Faro is not really interesting to visit, but I do not agree with that.

I liked the cozy center, the port, and the big Faro sign. Of course, it was crowded around the sign, because who doesn´t want to take a picture there 😉 Faro is a lovely city to explore for an afternoon.

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Albufeira in 1 hour

After Faro, we drove to Lagos. But not without stopping in Albufeira for 1 hour. I had heard many things about this town, but mostly that it is the place to be to party.

I wanted to just have a quick look at why everyone is talking about this place. Unfortunately, we had made a reservation at a hotel, so we could not stay in Albufeira for too long, but an hour was good to get a quick impression of this lively town.

I have to say that I did like to spend an hour in Albufeira. It´s pretty, there are so many restaurants and the beach looked so lively. I would have liked to spend here more than 1 hour 😉

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Lagos

I thought Faro was my favorite place in the Algarve, well I had not seen Lagos. It is quit the same as Faro, the same colorful streets and huge port. But what is different about Lagos, is that it way bigger, it is less medieval, it has a beach and beautiful rocks. We went on a boat tour through those rocks!

What. an. amazing. experience! Absolutely gorgeous!

All the different rocks and the clear blue water. We went to the hidden places, beaches and it was just a really nice feeling to be on the sea with a boat. Boats on this trip was a huge theme 😉 It was 1h 15 minutes long, 20 euros per person and we booked it in one of the kiosks next to the port, there are multiple over there.

One thing I love most about Portugal is the beautiful pavement, the patterns are always beautiful. I first experienced that in the Lisbon region and now here as well. I find Portugal very colorful and the same goes for Lagos.

Sagres & Tavira

Then, as we had to hand it the car later that day, we had to head back to Sevilla unfortunately.

If we could have stayed in the Algarve and explored more, I would definitely have loved that. We also did not have time to visit Sagres, another really beautiful place. If you just look on Google, you will get an idea of how it looks. Very different as all the other places we went to, as it is not colorful, but a place with a lot of high cliffs and fierce waves.

We did have time to visit Tavira, because it is also on the way to Sevilla. We did not have time to enjoy the beach on this trip, but my boyfriend wanted to take a dip in the sea in Portugal at least once, so that´s what we did. We went to Tavira´s beach for an hour and had a lovely time.