I would like to begin by saying I am not one for leaving negative reviews, I would usually just avoid writing a review at all. However, we stayed here for a month and our experience in this apartment negatively impacted our holiday too much not to comment.
On the positive side; the view is fantastic - the best in Lisbon, along with the location - you couldn’t ask for better. Graça is a lovely, quiet, less touristy area just up from Alfama.
The apartment itself is newly renovated so looks great on first inspection. Unfortunately that’s where the positives ended. There were numerous problems with the property that not only outweighed the positives but actually totally ruined our stay. So much so in fact, we spent 6 nights at the end of our stay elsewhere as we’d had enough of the place.
- When we arrived to the apartment we had no hot water in the shower. This issue ruined the first 7 days of our holiday because not only were we not able to wash ourselves or our 10 month old baby during that time, meaning we had to cancel 2 planned day trips; we also had to make sure we were at the property to meet the maintenance each day for their failed attempts to fix it.
- The windows in the living room and second bedroom leaked on our first night in the apartment. They did send someone over to fix the problem that day however the living room continued to leak and needed repairing from the outside. It took them a further 2 weeks to attempt to send someone to do this as they needed a dry day (it was dry 90% of those 2 weeks.) By which point we had had enough of waiting in for another maintenance person and were about to go on a trip to the north of Portugal. On returning to the apartment the day before we were checking out, there was a huge puddle of water in the middle of the living room.
- There is the most awful smell in the bathroom; sewer like. I could barely bring myself to use it. The problem had clearly been there a while as they had tried covering the vents with tape and air fresheners were in the drawers.
- The apartment also hadn’t been cleaned thoroughly before we stayed, there was food under the dining table and on the chairs.
- Finally, the apartment isn’t (or wasn’t) equipped for a long stay. We had to buy all sorts of kitchen equipment - hopefully they’ve left it all in there for others to use!
We asked for compensation for the inconveniences, suggesting 7 nights rent would be fair but were only given 4 - just over 10% of the amount we paid which we feel did not reflect the gravity of the issues the apartment caused us.