Our fall trip to Spain and Portugal allowed us to sample a range of accommodations throughout our nearly three-week exploration. We sampled everything from 3-star Madrid airport-area chain brands (Hotel Nuevo Boston and NH Barajas Airport) to boutique hotels (Hotel Vía Gótica in Burgos, Spain, and Hostal Airas Nunes in Santiago de Compostela, Spain) and fully furnished city apartments (in Porto, Lisbon and Madrid). We paid as little as $52 a night for a very nice, modern business hotel (with a pleasant restaurant on site and meeting facilities as well) on the outskirts of a provincial capital and as much as $115 per night at one of those airport-area hotels, so prices were extremely reasonable.

Of course, those good rates came with a little research and bookings made well in advance of our travel. While we wanted to stay within a reasonable budget on such a lengthy trip, we weren’t willing to sacrifice comfort and certain amenities to meet a particular price point. A big factor in our final choices also was location, location, location, especially in Lisbon, Porto and Madrid, where we spent three or more nights in each and planned to do lots of sightseeing. Between that research, familiarity with some of the locations (thanks to our travel partners’ previous sojourns in some of the places we visited) and a bit of savviness when it comes to reading between the lines of property descriptions, I am happy to say we were most pleased with all of our choices.

For location, our apartments in Porto couldn’t have been better. We were perhaps only about 100 yards from the Porto Cathedral, located in Batalha in the highest point of the city overlooking the Douro River and Gaia (home of most of the port houses) on the opposite shore. The apartment my husband and I shared was on two levels, with a bedroom loft upstairs from the main room hosting a kitchenette, living room and the bathroom. It overlooked a narrow alley lined with two- and three-story stone buildings — like ours, at least a few hundred years old — housing single- and multiple-family homes.   Across from our doorway on the ground floor was a tiny café which welcomed a steady stream of regulars throughout the day. Just up the hill sat the cathedral, its large plaza featuring a spiraled pillar and fountain.

Our friends’ place was on the opposite side of the building and another floor up, and it offered dramatic views over the tiled rooftops to the river and hills of the city.   Below was the impressive façade of another church (turned museum), accessed via a long set of stairs.   We soon became very familiar with the many and frequent elevation changes throughout Porto! Although we were very close to metro lines and stations and the main train station, we walked virtually everywhere during our three-day stay as, again, we were so centrally located.

After settling in to our rooms, we meandered just down the hill to get our first taste of the city (literally, for lunch at a café), strolling down the Rua das Flores to admire the lovely tiled façades      of the buildings lining this pedestrian thoroughfare overflowing with shops and restaurants.

That first evening we stopped to admire the sunset light on the cathedral      before circling around it on narrow cobbled streets and alleys to arrive at the Ponte Dom Luís I — the elegant double-decker bridge built in the 1880s by a partner of Gustav Eiffel — just in time to watch the sun set over the city.   It provided the perfect platform from which to get the lay of the land   and plot our sightseeing for the next few days. Just upstream sat the more modern Ponte do Infante.

Yes, we were more than pleased with our accommodations in this charming city and how perfectly situated we were to explore it.

— Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor