This was our first visit to Porto and the apartment on Rua Formosa is a great location to explore the city from. It takes about 15-20 mins to walk into the historic centre (Ribeira).
Positives:
- Good cooking amenities.
- Lovely old building on a nice street.
- For the centre the street is not noisy late at night even on a Saturday, and doesn’t disturb while sleeping (but see lighting situation).
- It has a balcony but we didn’t end up using it that much!
However the apartment itself was disappointing on a number of things, which altogether were hard to ignore.
These are our thoughts-
Major:
- The double bed is made of two singles, which is okay but the duvet was two singles too which is just silly. The info even says to let you know if you’re not a couple otherwise they’ll assume you are.
- There is a bad smell coming from somewhere in the cupboards in the kitchen which was really unpleasant.
- The lighting situation is unfortunate. The blinds that cover the windows let a lot of light in through the sides which woke us up early in the morning (and we’re used to very poor curtains back home!). The worst though is part of the wall near the bedroom is some kind of opaque plastic which lets light into the apartment from the stairwell. The stairwell is lit with natural light but also electric lights, which were accidentally left on and therefore woke us up at night. The lights are on timers but there is a master switch at the bottom of the stairs, so if this is flicked the other way all the lights will stay on. If there was a door to the bedroom this wouldn’t be an issue.
Minor:
- There’s no iron & board which in my opinion is a bit of an essential for travellers with folded up clothes.
- There was only a sponge and one small tea towel for the kitchen, would have been useful to have more tea towels for drying up and a cloth to wipe down surfaces.
- The shower plug must be blocked because the basin filled up very quickly. The shower kept dripping once turned off.
- It would have been a nice touch to have some cheap black tea and coffee- there was herbal tea but nothing for the mornings.
All in all we wouldn’t stay here again, but we were out most of the day so it didn’t negatively affect our experience of Porto, it was just a shame and seemed like silly things that could be got right with the right attention.