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I plan a trip for two people from Porto to Switzerland, stopping in Lisbon, Faro, Seville, Madrid and Narbonne. The trip will be in August.

 

I noticed that seat reservations for Portuguese trains are only possible at Portuguese stations. Since my planning does not allow me to arrive at the first train station (Porto) more than a few hours in advance, I would like to know how full the trains are in Portugal in August. I saw that on the day I want to take the train in Porto, there are a approximately a train every hour. I would like to know if I need to prepare a backup plan in the case that all trains are full. Anyone could give me a piece of information?

 

Best regards.

AFAIK availability in Portugal is not really a problem, not even shortly before departure. There may be exceptions though, e.g. around holidays.


Note you can make these reservations at any train station in Portugal. Trains can get fairly full in peak dates, so I'd try booking as many as possible as soon as you're near a Portuguese train station.

Luckily, the route you're taking trains are fairly frequent so there should hopefully still be some availability at some point. 

Regarding Faro-Seville, you're aware that you'll probably need to take a bus at least for a part of the journey?


Thank you for your answers :)

We will definitely book the whole trip when arriving at the train station in Porto. The problem is we do not have the possibility to come a few hours before our planned departure. As @Schelte say, normally at least one train will have two free places on the same day.

I scratched my head for a long time trying to find a fairly quick train between Portugal and Spain, but without any success. I finally booked a Flixbus from Faro airport (we will rent a car there, so it’s quite handy) to Seville, which takes 3 hours. At this point, this is the only trip I could actually book.


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