We held our small wedding at the Quinta do seisal. It's a beautiful place, gorgeous house and garden to have your wedding outside. Photos really don't do it justice. They have lovely dogs and chickens at the venue! And Dantas the property manager has been super kind and trying to help where he could. While we had an amazing time and wedding we had some issues.
- Communication issues: We visited the venue prior to check the place if it was good to have the wedding before booking. Communication was inconsistent as it was difficult to get hold of the owner. As mentioned in the airbnb the place is subject to an event fee which we had requested what that would be. We had been in contact for 3 months already before our visit but setting up a date to visit was difficult and getting an answer on the event fee was even more difficult.
Eventually, we just went to Portugal to visit other venues and hoped that the Quinta do Seisal would respond once we were there. They called at 6 am on the day of our flight that we could visit that day. So we did, but it was a very stressed and unreliable way of checking the venue.
We counted the rooms and beds and fell in love with the place. The property manager recommended us to book immediately. We booked for 2 nights and informed them we wanted to have an event (for 30-40 people).
However a few days later after booking (and a reminder from us) we were informed that the event fee was 2500 euros. When we checked other venues in Portugal, it was often a deposit of 500 - 1000 euros. We were quite distraught with this as we went all the way, when they could have informed us of the event fee before. We decided to cancel and they offered a discounted price 1000 euros as an event fee. We still thought this was very high but by this time the other venues were booked up already as we were informed too late. It was either this or postponing our wedding for a year. So we chose to go along with it. This event fee does not include any service at all, no catering, no furniture, no decorating, no cleaning.
- Accomodation changes: When we got to the venue right before the wedding, again we fell in love. But the room arrangements changed. We counted to rooms and beds before but now there were 2 single beds less. They said it was always this amount, but we went to check the venue prior to count the beds. So it could be that we counted wrong or I accidentally went into a room that was not meant for guests at that time. Either way, it was an unhappy surprise, but we found a solution for it.
- Neighbor(hood) unsafety: On the day of the wedding itself, we had an incident with the neighbor. We had karaoke at 6 PM (18.00), he was very upset with the noise and screamed at us directly from his garden/terrace from a far distance. Things he screamed:
"shut the fuck up", "what you are doing is illegal", "I am calling the police to get you arrested", "I will kill you", "You should go back to your country (racist remark)"
I expect that from an event fee of 1000 euros that the neighbors are informed or at least know to communicate directly with the property manager. It was this neighbor who was even noisier the whole day as they were working in the garden with strong electric tools.
All in all, lovely place if you are just staying with family to have fun and relax. But I would not recommend hosting an event here. You can't feel at ease making even a little noise during normal times and also we did not feel completely safe. And for us, the event fee felt too much as we actually left the place cleaner than we got it. We wiped off all the garden furniture outside which was full of dust and moved them in the way to create lounge area's so it looked better, decorated the place well, and left little decorations (e.g table runners, flowers) as we thought it will be a waste to just throw them away.