Porto Public Transport

The rule that saves money: every fare except the on-board bus ticket lives on the Andante Azul card, and the card itself is €0.60. Occasional titles are zone tickets that last from first validation, not from midnight; the 24-hour titles and the Tour passes are loaded whole and start when you first tap. Children under 4 travel free when they do not occupy a seat, and the tariff prints no child fare on Andante titles for anyone older.

On ten identical titles the eleventh is free.

What the tariff leaves out

Three things. The Tour passes are printed as 'válidos em toda a rede Andante, exceto elétricos e funicular', so a reader who buys the Tour 3 expecting to ride the tram to Foz on it pays €6 at the door; the tram page prices the alternatives. There is no 48-hour title: two days means two 24-hour loads or the Tour 3, and the with-transport Porto.CARD solves it by handing you two separate 24-hour tickets with an instruction not to validate both on the same day.

And the tariff prints the fine for travelling without a validated title, €120 to €350, but not a grace rule for a card that failed to read; validate, watch for the green light, and validate again at every change of vehicle, because the inspectors on the line D bridge crossing check the last tap, not the balance.

The Andante Azul card is sold at every metro station's machines, in English, for €0.60, and at the Andante shops at Trindade and Campanhã; it is a paper-backed contactless card that holds one kind of title at a time, so a Tour pass and single-ride credit cannot sit on it together. One card per person: the tariff says so, and a shared card fails the inspector. Load it, then validate on every boarding at the yellow post — on the metro platform before you step on, because Porto's stations have no gates, and inside the bus by the driver. A single title lasts one hour on Z2 from first validation and covers changes between metro and bus inside that hour; each extra zone adds a ring and fifteen minutes, which is why the Z4 airport ride is 1 h 15.

The zones are the trap for a first-timer. Z2 is not a place: it is the zone you board in plus the ring of zones that touch it, so a Z2 ticket bought at Trindade covers a different map from a Z2 ticket bought at Matosinhos. Count zones on the destination list printed at every machine, and when in doubt buy the next zone up — the difference between Z2 and Z3 is 45 cents, the fine is €120. Whether Casa da Música to Trindade is Z2 is not stated on an official page we could read (the metro's zone calculator is script-only), though both stations sit inside the Porto municipal zone; check the machine before printing it in your own plan.

Cards, apps and the on-board ticket

Since 26 January 2026 every STCP bus has taken a bank card, phone or watch for the €2.50 'bilhete de bordo', which is valid only on that bus; it is the fallback for a card that ran out, not a way to travel. The metro sells no ticket on board and has no contactless bank-card gate of the Lisbon kind, so the Andante card is the only way onto a train. Metro do Porto and STCP each publish an app for timetables and, in Andante's case, for buying titles onto a phone, but the operators' pages do not state that visitors without a Portuguese tax number can use the phone-based Andante, so we do not print it as a way to pay.

The paper card works for everyone and costs 60 cents. The official fare pages are metrodoporto.pt and stcp.pt; the English fare page on en.metrodoporto.pt showed the 2024 table on in Q3 2026 (Z3 €1.80, Tour €7.50), so read the Portuguese page or the STCP poster.

Metro do Porto is a light-rail network, on the surface for most of its length and underground through the centre, six lines lettered A to F. Five of them, A, B, C, E and F, share the trunk from Campanhã through Bolhão and Trindade to Casa da Música before fanning out to Matosinhos, Póvoa de Varzim, ISMAI, the airport and Senhora da Hora; line D runs north–south from Hospital São João through Trindade and São Bento, over the upper deck of the Luís I bridge to Jardim do Morro in Gaia and on to Santo Ovídio. Trains run 06:00 to 01:00 on every line; the Sept-2026 frequency sheet shows first departures between about 05:44 and 06:20 by terminus and last ones between 00:26 and 01:19.

The stops a visitor uses: Trindade, where line D meets the trunk and the tourist office sits inside the station; São Bento for the tiled hall and the walk down to Ribeira; Bolhão for the market; Jardim do Morro for the lodges and the Serra do Pilar terrace; Casa da Música for the bus onward to Serralves; Campanhã for every intercity train; Aeroporto at the end of line E; Senhor de Matosinhos on line A for the fish restaurants and the cruise terminal. Ribeira, the Sé and Foz have no metro. The line D crossing of the bridge is the one ride worth taking for its own sake: $1.63 (€1.40) for the view the six-bridges cruise sells from below. Official maps are on metrodoporto.pt; the transport map below pins the interchanges.

STCP buses fill the gaps the metro leaves: the riverside, Foz, Serralves and the airport by surface. The lines that matter to a visitor are 500 along the river from Praça da Liberdade to Matosinhos market by the coast (its line page returned 404 to us, so times are not printed here; the winter timetable starts on 27 October and the summer one on 30 March), 601 and 602 from Cordoaria to the airport from 05:30 to midnight about every 25 minutes, and 604 from Hospital São João to the airport from 06:00 to 21:00. Fares are the same Andante titles as the metro, or the €2.50 on-board ticket.

The STCP page says timetables 'vary depending on the time of year'; the line pages on stcp.pt are the source on the day.

The night: M-lines from Aliados

When the metro stops at 01:00 the 'linhas da madrugada' take over, all of them leaving from Avenida dos Aliados: 1M to Matosinhos Praia, 2M to Hospital São João, 3M to the airport, 4M to Maia, 5M to Ermesinde, 7M to Valongo, 8M to São Pedro da Cova, 9M to Gondomar, 10M to Vila d'Este. The 2026 tariff has no separate night fare, so a Tour pass or a Z2 single loaded that afternoon still works, and the driver takes a bank card for the €2.50 ticket. For a 03:00 flight the 3M leaves Aliados on the hour from 00:30 and is the only public transport to the airport at that hour; the airport page sets it against the private transfer, which is the fixed-price alternative when a case and a sleeping child are involved.

Porto has run trams since 1895, the first in Iberia, and three heritage lines survive as STCP’s ‘Porto Tram City Tour’: line 1 along the river from Infante, by the Palácio da Bolsa, to Passeio Alegre in Foz, daily about 08:40 to 20:43 every 20 minutes or so; line 18 from Massarelos, by the tram museum, up to Carmo by the Clérigos tower, about 09:15 to 19:45 every half hour; and line 22, a circular from Carmo to Batalha, whose hours the tariff does not print. The fares are STCP’s ‘Tarifário Carro Elétrico’: €6 a ride for an adult and €3.50 for a child, €8 for two trips the same day, €12 ($13.95) for a two-day ticket and €6 for the child version, sold on board. Andante monthly passes with the right zoning are accepted; occasional titles and the Tour passes are not, and blogs that print €3.50 as the adult fare are quoting the child row of a leaflet that prints its numbers without labels.

A tram single takes 30 percent off the Museu do Carro Eléctrico at Massarelos, the two-day ticket 50 percent. The tram page has the routes stop by stop and the verdict on line 1, which is the ride to Foz that a bus does for €1.40 without the wooden seats; the walking, boat and cable-car combination is the tour-shaped way to see the same riverside.

The Funicular dos Guindais climbs 61 metres on a 281-metre track from the Ribeira end of the Luís I bridge to Batalha, which is the stair every visitor otherwise walks between the quay and the Sé. It is run by STCP Serviços, not STCP buses, on its own tariff: €4 single and €6 return for an adult, €2 and €3 for a child of 4 to 12, €3 with a Porto.CARD, and free for Andante monthly-pass holders with zone PRT1; 25 people a cabin, every 10 minutes, summer hours Sunday to Thursday 08:00–22:00 and Friday and Saturday to midnight, continuous through the night of São João. On in Q3 2026 the operator's page read 'atualmente, o Funicular encontra-se encerrado para manutenção' with no reopening date, after an earlier five-month closure that ended on 18 April; the next IMT inspection is due in 2027. Until it reopens the climb is on foot, or the long way round by metro from São Bento to Jardim do Morro and back across the lower deck.

The Gaia cable car on the other bank is a private ride, not public transport, and neither Andante nor the Porto.CARD covers it: €7 one way, €10 return, €3.50 and €5 for a child of 5 to 12, €22.50 for a family return, daily 10:00–20:00 from 26 April to 24 September and 10:00–18:00 in the depth of winter. It links the Jardim do Morro metro stop to the Gaia quay by the lodges, which makes it the step-free way down that the closed funicular no longer offers on the Porto side; the walking tour with the cable car and boat folds the fare into a $69.67 (€60) afternoon.

CP's urban trains from São Bento and Campanhã are the day-trip transport to Braga, Guimarães and Aveiro, and the Douro line to Régua and Pinhão is a day out in itself. The urban fares are by zone on a separate CP scale — €1.65 for one or two zones rising to €6.65 for seventeen — and the Andante card carries them for the zones the Andante area covers; the zone counts for Porto to Braga, Guimarães and Aveiro were not readable on the January 2026 poster we fetched, so buy at the machine. Figures below from the CP 'TP 2026' price documents read in Q3 2026, valid from 1 January 2026; CP prints no journey times on any price PDF.

Two rules the tables hide. São Bento is the terminus for the Douro line and most urban trains, and its azulejo hall is the reason to start there; every Alfa Pendular and Intercidades uses Campanhã, one metro stop east, so a Lisbon train is a change. And the Douro Regional ends at Régua: Pinhão, Tua and Pocinho are InterRegional fares, and the with-transport Porto.CARD covers CP urban trains only as far as Paredes, Paramos, Vila das Aves and Lousado, none of which is the Douro.

The Douro Valley page sets the €12.45 train against the coach-and-boat day, and the Braga, Guimarães and Aveiro pages carry what the official sites gave us for each.

Portuguese labour law requires at least five working days' notice of a strike, ten where a company serves 'necessidades sociais impreteríveis', which transport does; notices and the minimum-services orders are filed with DGERT at dgert.gov.pt, and the operators repeat them, metrodoporto.pt in its news list, stcp.pt under 'alterações de serviço', cp.pt under 'avisos'. On in Q3 2026 DGERT held no Metro do Porto or STCP notice for September or October 2026, the metro's 2026 news list showed none, and the STRUN strike that had cut the last two service hours on STCP since November 2023 ended by agreement on 2 June 2026. CP was the exception: a notice for Regional trains on the Linha do Norte from 7 to 12 September 2026, which touches the Coimbra and Aveiro Regional connections rather than the Porto urban lines, and is the kind of item to read the day before a day trip.

The do's and don'ts: validate before every boarding and at every change, including the platform post on the metro, because there is no gate to remind you; keep the card, since an inspector reads the last validation and the fine is €120 to €350; count the zones at the machine and buy one up when unsure; do not board a tram with a Tour pass and expect it to work; do not stand on the Ribeira quay at 00:50 planning a metro home from São Bento, which is a ten-minute climb away and closes at 01:00;. Pickpockets work the line D bridge crossing and the São Bento platform at peak; the safety page has the pattern and the tourist-police address.