Liiiving in Porto - Historic Clérigos Apartments

Very cozy apartment

Cleanly

Great space and very central location.

1) Quite a few gentleman clubs on the same street as this apartment, which you might not realise when booking. Though, while busy, there wasn’t any trouble. 2) Not much leeway (if any) on check in time if you arrive early on the day, and then if you want to your leave bags it’s at another location and comes with a charge per bag - not the most accommodating or convenient. First building access is achieved through a link sent to your phone and is a wireless/keyless entry, I assume via Bluetooth. The link doesn’t activate until the 3pm check in time.

The location was excellent, very central, 2 minutes to Torre de Clerigos

The apartment is located centrally, although the street it’s in is quite weird! The communication with the staff was quite good and they responded quite quickly to my messages.

I had quite high expectations from the apartment, considering it’s not cheap. However it doesn’t meet the standards to deserve that price. I’ve stayed in Porto in much better places for a lot lesser (in the same time period). I had booked the apartment for 3 nights. First thing I noticed on entering was a really strong chemical smell of cleaning solutions from the bathroom. This smell never went away. Also the apartment was advertised as 42 sqm in size but it appeared to be a lot smaller. I even thought there might have been a mistake and double checked if I had the right apartment 😅. I really don’t think it’s 42 sqm or perhaps that includes the staircase area as well. The flooring squeaked with every step I made. I was conscious of this because I heard the noises from other apartments. Every time someone came to my floor or the floors above I knew as it got very noisy. The apartment is very very humid (it’s an old building so perhaps this is normal). I was relying on the AC to dehumidify which worked quite ok on the first night but it stopped working on the second evening. I wrote to the staff and they did reply but in the meantime the AC started to work again so I updated them about it. However a little later it stopped working again. It was quite late by then so I didn’t try to contact the staff to fix it. It was hard to sleep though. I decided to checkout a day earlier and stay with a local friend instead. One of my main peeves with this property is that it felt like it’s purely a business. The cost isn’t justified, the quality of the place is mediocre but just made to look nice. I wouldn’t stay here again.