Cycling in Portugal – a lot to love

By Bill

We love cycling, especially cycling in Portugal where there’s a strong biking culture and we can pedal 12 months of the year.

In addition to great weather, Portugal has a lot of dedicated bike lanes, rides to and by the ocean, rolling hills, steep hills, flats, cycling groups, cycling races (that we watch) and cycle-friendly hotels. It’s not unusual to encounter six or seven other groups of cyclists on a Sunday ride here.

We’ve lived in Alcobaça, in central Portugal, for the past year without a car, relying instead on our bikes for day-to-day getting around and touring locally, using buses or rental cars for longer trips. So, I feel ready to comment on what cycling in Portugal is like. 

Types of bikes

In Alcobaça, we are surrounded by hills with 100 to 150 metres of elevation gain so unless we are riding beside the Alcoa River, we have to climb hills. Kathryn’s road bike lacks a granny gear (“because I’m not a granny,” she says) and she was tired of being last up the hills. Loyal readers will remember Kathryn really enjoyed an e-bike when we were in Panama. So, in November she purchased a Kona Libre EL e-bike. It’s a reasonable balance between being light enough to carry up the stairs to our apartment and having a big enough battery to go 100 kilometres or more on a charge. The store near Lisbon where we bought the bike even delivered it to us for a small fee. She can now leave me and my Kona touring bike in her dust – literally.

I continue to ride my Kona steel frame touring bike. Although it is a bit heavy, it has all the gears I need and I don’t worry at all when a gravel road is the best path forward. I can also mount bike bags on its luggage rack when we go grocery shopping. The vast majority of the bikes we see on the roads are proper road/racing cycles. Shop keepers here say that full suspension mountain bikes are the best sellers but all of the shops carry lots of road bikes as well.

Daily biking

Our weekly cycling routine includes a trip to the supermarket with our bike bags, a leisurely ride or two, and a 50-kilomtre-ish ride with the bike club. These trips are a mix of riding on cobblestones, paved secondary roads, paved farm roads, dedicated bike lanes and a little bit of gravel and dirt roads.

Although we walk to most places within Alcobaça (café, doctor, bank, library, and the weekly farmers’ market), we use our bikes to go grocery shopping at the larger supermarkets on the edge of town. It’s an easy ride there; we load up our four panniers (bike bags) and bring home the bacon.

Daily biking in our small town is easy because there’s little traffic. We enjoy one short section of beautiful bike lanes and are looking forward to the planned expansion. One thing Alcobaça could use is more usable bike racks; however, there’s no shortage of posts and fences and other things to lock bikes to. In truth, I disklike most bike racks because they seem designed to bend your tire rims.

Leisure rides

Our favourite leisure ride is a 20-kilometre roundtrip ride to the beach at Nazaré. Our route follows the Alcoa River and is a flat ride on paved farm roads. These single-lane roads allow farmers to access the orchards and small fields of onions, cabbages, beans and peppers. We stop at a few fig trees along the way for snacks.

Arriving at Nazaré, we get onto the bike path that runs the entire length of the 1.5-kilometre beach and peruse the cafés and restaurants for a place to stop for coffee or lunch. Nazaré is busy with tourists, who come to see the highest surfable waves in the world – up to 100 feet high in the winter. In the summer, people lounge on the beach, shop at the lively fish market, and investigate the traditional fish-drying racks and fishing boats. We usually lock our bikes to a post, dip our toes in the ocean, then relax on the white sand for a while before heading home.

Another short ride takes us through the Green Park (the Portuguese themselves laugh at their lack of original names) on stone-dust trails and out to the source of the Alcoa River in the foothills. There, we wander around some old water-powered mills, now in ruins, and cross the old stone bridges.

Fitness rides

We joined the Silvercoasters cycling group (a clever name since this area is known as the “Silver Coast” of Portugal, most of the group has silver hair, and we always coast down the hills).

This group of expats (from Canada, the U.S., Scotland, Belgium and the Netherlands) rides three days a week. Sundays are the easy ride of 50 to 60 kilometres – the rides we usually join. Tuesday’s rides are longer and Thursdays are always more than 100 kilometres. Those distances are from the starting point, usually six kilometres from our apartment, so we automatically add another 12 kilometres getting to the start and back.

The group has proven to be a wonderful way to meet people, gain friends and discover new routes.

Most rides feature a stop midway for a coffee and pastry, and then a rehydration stop at the end. A frequent ride takes us north to the village of Pataias on paved forest service roads, swings west to Vale Furado for coffee overlooking the ocean, then south over rolling hills on a bike path that runs beside the Estrada Atlantica with its cool ocean breezes. We arrive in Sitio, which overlooks Nazaré, coast down the hill to Nazaré and back through the farms. What a great 50-plus-12-kilometre loop that is!

Touring and exploring rides

Our first taste of bike touring in Portugal was in 2019 when we rode the Camino de Santiago from Lisbon north to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Many sections of this trail were fun to ride – the beaches, the bike paths, the quiet lanes through vineyards and forests. But there were also some parts we don’t plan to ride on again, such as the Roman roads and steep, rock-strewn goat tracks!

We’ve also ridden north to Batalha along logging roads to visit the wonderful Monastery – a 50-kilometre trip there and back.

When you want to go further in a day, putting your bike on a train is easily done. We discovered this after completing the Camino; we took our bikes on trains to get all the way south to the Algarve. The slower regional trains allow two bikes on each designated car for free. When the train pulls into a station, the conductor steps off; he directs us to the train car that can take bikes. We lift them onto the train and usually hang them on bike hooks at the end of the car. You can even buy your ticket on board if you like. It’s a pretty easy process.

Recently, we took our bikes on the train to visit Leiria, a half-hour north of Alcobaça. We caught the early train, disembarked at Leiria station, rode along the Lus River bike paths all through town, visited the castle and paper museum, and then caught the late train home.

Exploring further by car

We decided to buy half a car so we could load our bikes and take our cycling in Portugal adventures further afield. Half a car? We shared the purchase of our 2010 Honda Jazz (aka Honda Fit in North America) with another couple. We’ve drawn up a car-sharing agreement and generally have use of the car (the full car!) every other week.

This method of exploring is new, as of May 2023, but so far, we’re confident it’s going to work well. Our first adventure was a wonderful afternoon on an ecopista near Porto de Mos. (Ecopistas are old rail beds turned into biking and hiking trails.) The Porto de Mos ecopista took us through two tunnels (see top photo) and past information panels explaining the trail’s former use to transport coal from several mines down the mountain. We enjoyed spectacular views over a valley where ceramics factories still proliferate  and over limestone quarries, which were used by the Romans and are still in use today. There are some serious mountain bike trails nearby but we’re saving those for another day.

We also loaded our bikes in the car one day and drove to Pia do Urso – a cute little schist village (i.e. where all the buildings and roads are made from schist stone) where we cycled around the cobblestone streets.

Valuable resources

Our Ottawa friends Hans and Karen cycled on two ecopistas while visiting Portugal this past April. Hans writes an excellent blog called Hans on the Bike for Ottawa cyclists; you can read his stories about cycling the Dão and Evora ecopistas. The Dão is a famous wine region and Evora is a charming old walled city with a Roman temple.

Another valuable resource for cycling in Portugal is Ecovias Portugal’s “Road Books” that have 7,300 kilometres of mapped routes. You can pay for complete route information, but there are also lots of free itineraries and useful information available. The tour company Pedal Portugal also has a great website with other route ideas.

What’s next?

There is still a lot more of Portugal to explore by bike, especially with our half-car. We’re also looking at some bike-and-barge trips in Italy and along the Danube River in Austria. I do hope to get fitter by cycling more often. Really, I have no excuses like snow or cold winters anymore! The leader of our Silvercoasters cycling group is 82 years old. He rides three times a week and carries his bike up the stairs to his 4^th floor apartment. I hope I can be half that fit when I reach 82.

Looking forward to more adventures while cycling in Portugal on the long road home.

We’ve been cycling in Portugal since 2019. Find out where we are right now by visiting our ‘Where’s Kathryn?’ page.