Planning a family trip to Portugal? TripNest turns it into its own app: 10 narrated story podcasts about Portugal for the drive, games and a quiz for the kids, an audio phrasebook, and the day-by-day plan and map the whole family shares.
Start your Portugal trip - free
How small Portuguese boats crossed big oceans
Five hundred years ago, sailors left Portuguese harbours in wooden ships to find sea routes nobody in Europe had mapped. Vasco da Gama sailed all the way around Africa to India. We'll look at the ships, the star-reading tools, and what it was like to be a boy working on deck.
A hillside full of towers and secret gardens
In the misty hills above the coast sits a bright yellow-and-red palace, a ruined Moorish castle along a ridge, and a garden with a spiral well you can walk down inside. Kings and queens came here to escape the summer heat. Bring your imagination and comfortable shoes.
Getting around a city built on slopes
Lisbon has so many hills that it needed lifts, funiculars and rattling trams just to move people about. After a great earthquake in 1755, one whole neighbourhood was rebuilt with wide, straight streets on purpose. Find out why the city looks the way it does.
The story painted on Portugal's walls
Azulejo tiles cover churches, benches, shops and station walls, and many of them tell whole stories panel by panel. Some show ships, some show saints, some show pigeons and lemons. We'll learn how a plain clay square turns into shiny blue art.
Listening to fado
Fado songs are about missing people, missing the sea and missing home, and they are sung slowly so every word lands. The Portuguese guitar behind the singer has twelve strings and a fat pear-shaped body. Have a listen and see if you can hear it.
What's on the table in Portugal
Portuguese cooks salt and dry cod so it lasts for months, then soak it again to cook it hundreds of different ways. In summer, whole streets smell of sardines on charcoal. And then there is the custard tart, which you should eat with a dusting of cinnamon.
Cork oaks and the quiet Alentejo
Once every nine years or so, workers carefully strip the bark off a cork oak, and the tree simply grows a new layer. That bark becomes bottle stoppers, flooring, notice boards and even bags. We'll walk through a cork forest and meet the birds and pigs that live there.
Dinosaurs left their trail across Portugal
In a former limestone quarry in central Portugal, you can walk beside a long line of enormous round footprints made by long-necked sauropods. They were pressed into soft mud that later turned to stone. How do scientists work out how big and how fast the animal was?
The Azores, out in the middle of the Atlantic
The Azores are nine green islands that grew up out of the ocean floor, with lakes sitting inside old craters and steam rising out of the ground. Cooks there lower pots into hot earth to make a stew. Whales swim past offshore, and people watch for them from cliff towers.
Why the sea at Nazaré goes wild
Just off the fishing town of Nazaré there is a deep underwater canyon that funnels ocean swell and stacks it up into towering winter waves. Surfers get towed in by jet ski to ride them. We'll find out how a hole in the seabed makes a mountain of water.
The Atlantic Ocean / The Mediterranean Sea / The Pacific Ocean
Porto / Lisbon / Faro / Coimbra
France / Morocco / Spain
The Portugal podcast has 10 narrated story episodes for the car or the plane: Ships That Went Looking, The Palaces of Sintra, Trams, Hills and Tiles, Blue and White Everywhere, A Guitar With a Round Belly, Custard Tarts and Grilled Sardines, The Trees That Grow Their Skin Back, Footprints in the Rock, Islands Made of Volcanoes and The Biggest Waves.
"Obrigado", said oh-bree-GAH-doo. It's one of the phrases in the Portugal audio phrasebook, recorded so the kids can hear it before they try it.
112 (Emergency (all services)). TripNest puts it in your trip's contacts page next to your own contacts.
Every trip starts free: the day-by-day plan, map and contacts. Premium adds the Portugal podcasts, kids' games and the audio phrasebook for $24, once per trip - no subscription.
No. Your trip is one link that opens on everyone's phone, grandparents included, without an account. You can add it to your home screen so it works offline once you land.