Lisbon+Barcelona vs Lisbon+Porto for 8 days (flying from US)
Hi friends, my family is planning on visiting spain and/or portugal in November/December. I think this maybe a offpeak/shoulder season? Not sure how the weather will be but I think it should be ok...
We will be flying from San Francisco. This will be our first time visiting the Iberian region (though we have experience in other parts of Europe like France, Italy, Switzerland, etc). We are pretty hard set on Lisbon at least and we are really torn/debating on what to pick for the second city to visit.
The current choice is either SF -> Lisbon (4 days) -> Fly to Barcelona 4 days -> Fly out from BCN back to SF. Or we can do SF -> Lisbon (4 days) -> train to Porto(4days) -> train back to Lisbon -> then fly back to SF.
I am favoring Barcelona slightly just because there are more international flights out of Barcelona. Would much rather do multi-city hop than having to do a train back to Lisbon where we started with just to fly back home. A lot of time can be wasted just going back and forth to LIS as a hub.
Trip preference: we want the trip to be more relaxed so more focus on food, sight seeing, minor shopping, etc. But also we all get bored quickly lol, so ideally the two cities (whether LIS + Porto vs LIS + Barcelona) will be different enough. We took super long trips in Japan and our excitement started dying off quickly when some Japanese cities/towns are becoming too similar that we no longer feel as hyped exploring each day.
Any suggestions would be great! Thanks all