Steelhorse Adventures

Winter in Portugal

Portugal is known for it calm winters especially in the south Algarve region.

I decided to stay in the north for november and december and go down to the south in january and february.

Staying in Porto

The first 2 months (November and December) i stayed in Porto. Sadly it rained a lot so the bike was mostly covered under a rain coat.

I stayed in a AirBnB accomodation. What you have to know about the north in winter, it is not that warm as i thought :-). The houses usually don't have a central heating (you have these electronic heaters which sucks a lot of energy, which i don't like).

It also rained on most days and the temperature was between 6 and 16 degree celsius.

But, if you have sun, you can visit the mountain area nearby and do a lot of nice hikes. Or you can ride the long twisty roads along the river and throught the mountains.

Internet

As you already may know, i am working as a systems engineer and software developer for inovex GmbH. So it is possible to work remote with a good internet connection.

So the first thing i tried to figure out is where to get a good data sim card.

I found 3 providers with good offers. Vodafone, MEO and NOS.

Vodafone

I didn't tested vodafone. But from the things i heard and read it has the best service of all 3. At the time of writing this page they had a new offer. 30 EUR for 60GB and 30 days.

MEO

This one i used first. I had 15 days with 30 GB for 15 EUR. The connection in the Porto area was very good. I could do video calls without problems.

NOS

After using MEO i discoverd NOS. For NOS i pay 1 EUR for 1 day and unlimited traffic. In november i used about 120GB traffic without any problems.

It seems that they throtteling the download speed but for watching videos and for video calls (i use google meet a lot) it is not a problem.

The SIM card itself costs about 2.50 EUR (as far as i remember).