5 Practical Tips for Traveling in Portugal with Toddlers

Portugal is a great family trip (quiet beaches, cheap delicious food, great public transportation), but if you’re thinking about taking young toddlers along, you will need to prepare yourself.

It’s been a year since we took our twin sons to Portugal to visit family. It took our recent trip to Boston before I recovered enough from the experience to write about it.

My boys were 16 months old then. Some people would find it absurd to even consider an 11-hour flight from Los Angeles to Lisbon with kids that young. They were still in diapers, unable to focus for long periods of time, and just mobile enough to get themselves hurt. And Portugal, as much as I love it, is not very baby friendly. Many lessons were learned on that trip. Lessons that I hope by sharing will benefit young families traveling to Portugal in the coming years.

Get ready to pull up your sleeves.

Prepare yourself with a clean pad to change your little ones’ diapers in the strangest of places. Unfortunately, there are very few public places that offer diaper changing tables—even train stations, restaurants, and department stores. Some offer it in their bathrooms, but you have to pay to use them. When you find a free changing table, take advantage. Otherwise, I won’t judge you if you change your kid’s dirty diaper on the seat of a cross-country bus with no bathroom access. You do what you have to do.

Ditch the wheels.

Cobblestone streets and vintage doorways found in the most beautiful areas of Portugal have been in use for centuries. They were not built for easy access for strollers and wheelchairs. Most newer buildings do offer wider doorways and bigger bathrooms, but if you want to explore the heart of any city in Portugal, don’t bring the stroller. Wear your kids if they can’t walk well yet.

Bring your own booster seats.

Though Portugal is family-oriented, there were few options for high chairs at restaurants off the tourist path, and sometimes even within it. The highchairs offered to us most of the time were the kind that hangs off the table.

Thank goodness they placed a chair behind my big boy, who pushed himself off the table and onto the chair a few of times in two different restaurants. These highchairs are not only inconvenient but extremely dangerous. Bring your own booster seats and your little ones will be safer and happier.

Some things are worth the splurge.

I’m not saying Portugal is an expensive country, quite the contrary. I’m suggesting that sometimes when it looks like it’s too good to be true, it probably is. For instance, bringing both toddlers as lap children to take advantage of the free flights for kids under 2 years old.

The problem with this is every row on an airplane has only one extra oxygen mask, and we needed two extras for our little ones. So my husband and I were forced to sit separately most of our flights. Being right behind each other didn’t help the matter. It was still hard to swap toys and toddlers or entertain both of them at once. Not being able to easily pass them off to each other, even with only one child, would be difficult.

If I did it again, I would buy one extra seat for both boys, so we would be able to sit as a family and have a little more room. It would’ve been well worth the $900 round-trip ticket, in hindsight. I think our neighbors on the flights would agree.

Pack your snacks in separate bags.

Take it from me, packing all your food into one bag means that if you lose that bag, you lose all your children’s food, too. We left behind a cooler of baby food in the taxi for our flight home. It cost us $90 and a hell of a lot of stress to repurchase it all at the airport. We were lucky. Only one store sold baby food at the Lisbon airport.

This is a general tip for traveling with kids, but essential when you can’t contact your taxi driver to retrieve your missing items. The taxi system in Portugal is not quite like Uber. The company can’t locate your driver once they leave the airport, so your stuff is gone forever.

None of these tips are meant to deter you from traveling to Portugal with your little ones. The natural beauty, delicious food, and low prices make this a great family holiday. The best family vacations always take a little more planning. Portugal is no exception.

I’m not a travel expert, but I have visited Portugal many times throughout my life, and our last family trip to Portugal was an eye-opener. I learned so much about how to travel right with toddlers, and am very humbled by the amenities we have grown accustomed to in the United States. Keeping a city in its historical beauty sometimes means you sacrifice modern conveniences. I still think it’s well worth it.

Do you have any tips or questions of your own? Let me know! We’re planning another trip to visit family in Portugal in a couple years.