PO2 Caminando North Portugal Traveller Reviews

We stayed in 5 varied and excellent hotels seeing a wide variety of sights in north Portugal. The holiday was very well organised, the app made it very easy, directions etc were all very accurate. We would highly recommend Casa Cantabricas.

They were efficient and had obviously put a lot of work into selecting the best accommodation and planning the tour.

We had a very varied and interesting tour with lovely hotels, which we would have been hard pressed to have found for ourselves. Two of the hotels were in towns/ cities (Porto and Guimares); three were quintas with swimming pools in lovely rural locations in northern Portugal. The varied requirements of our party of 7 in terms of relaxation, scenery, walking and places to see were all satisfied in spades and the amount of driving was about right. The 10 day duration was perfect. We would certainly recommend Caminos/ book again with them in future.

Caminos were very good, taking a personal interest in us and our booking and communicating well with us both before the holiday and during. The Vamoos Travel app was a great idea, which enabled us to have all the holiday information and bookings readily available on our phones/ iPads.

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We loved touring round this green and lush part of Portugal being able to make our own daily itinerary. The chosen pre-booked accommodation was fabulous in every case. Unusual pousadas, quintas and medieval city hotels that we probably would not have discovered on our own.

Excellent and responsive service. Great little app called Vamoos which had all the holiday information, maps, guides, car hire and hotel information included.

This was our 6th touring holiday organised for us by Casas Cantabricas and this time my partner and I started our 10 days at a gem of a small hotel in Porto, the Pensao Favorita. It was quite charming and within walking distance of the city centre and all of the attractions. After 2 days there we collected a hire car from the airport - driving in Porto is something of an unknown nightmare - and headed inland, following the Duoro valley, with vineyards as far as the eye could see. We were stunned by just how high up to the hill tops the terracing extended. How long had that taken to create and what hard work it must have been. Our second stay, at the secluded vineyard of the Morgadio da Calcada, near Provezende, was another treat for all of the senses. The old buildings have been beautifully restored and rooms are mostly arranged around intimate little courtyards. The dining room was very grand but still felt welcoming and dinner was shared at one long table with the host telling us all about the wines he was serving. The small pool, sheltered by high stone walls, also felt very private and somehow special. We explored the surrounding area by car, taking in Pinhao and the Duoro valley and also discovered a charming little bar in the village itself! From there we headed further inland, over the border and on to Salamanca. What an interesting city, with beautiful architecture and its famous Plaza Mayor. When we were there the square was sporting a huge sculpture of a very shiny, silver elephant balanced vertically on its trunk! Our Spanish is not good enough to know what that was all about! Temperatures were considerably higher than normal for mid-June, so our wanderings involved a lot of shade-hopping, apart from when we walked over the Roman bridge, but the view back across the old city was worth the effort. As for the Museum of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, wow! What a delight that was. After Salamanca we drove back into Portugal, stopping to see Cuidad Rodrigo and its beautiful old walls, which we walked right round, accompanied by hundreds of swifts and a good few storks and a handful of little lizards. We would have stayed longer but the temperature was around 39C so a little warm for sightseeing. Our penultimate stay was up in the mountains of the Serra da Estrela, at the Casa das Penhas Douradas, a quite special sort of place. No doubt the views would have been spectacular, but sadly a mix of intense heat haze and, across the horizon, a distant pall of brown smoke from the disastrous forest fires, limited visibility to only those of the nearest slopes. We did a lot of driving from there, taking in glaciated valleys, rugged mountain crags and reservoirs but possibly the best fun was to be had driving up and down kilometer after kilometer of hairpin bend roads - we loved it but it's not for the nervous driver! Our final two days were spent back on the coast in Aveiro. The hotel could not have been better placed, overlooking the famous canal and its colourful boats. Overall then, Casas Cantabricas gave us exactly what we wanted, a holiday tailored to our likes and dislikes, that we thoroughly enjoyed in places that we love and one that we will always remember.

We have now visited Spain and Portugal 6 times with Casas Cantbricas, each time visiting new regions. They have never failed to come up with a well-planned itinerary, taking in some stunning and interesting destinations. The accommodation they find suits us perfectly, from city-centre hotel to mountain-top retreat, from tucked-away quintas to ducal palaces - wonderful! They also provide all of the information you need beforehand and an app which we used for the first time this year and found it extremely useful. I can't fault them!

This was an excellent 14 day touring holiday, based on a 10 day Casas Cantabricas holiday. They were very flexible and helpful about the necessary arrangements and adjustments. In the final form, we stayed four nights in all in Porto and two nights each in five different locations, four of which were historic Quintas in the countryside and the fifth a very good well-positioned hotel in Guimaraes. All the Quintas were good or excellent but perhaps the highlight was the night in a Quinta high above the Douro where we had the whole of the 18th century manor house and grounds to ourselves, with the only other person in evidence being the very helpful lady who cooked an excellent dinner and served it to us on a balcony off the panelled dining room. In advance, we were slightly nervous that this was Casas Cantabricas' first year operating in Portugal and that as we were quite early in the year (in May), there might be some teething problems at some destinations. But it was clear that Casas had done the necessary on-the-ground work and in the event their efforts resulted in us staying in much more interesting places than we might have booked if we had tried to arrange it all ourselves.

Casas Cantabricas are a North Spain specialist with 2017 being their first year operating in Nothern Portugal. They were very helpful and flexible in arranging our touring holiday in Northern Portugal and it was clear that they had put a lot of work into identifying interesting and high quality places to stay, notably historic quintas in the Douro valley and elsewhere that we would not have found by our own efforts