Extremely beautiful surroundings, nice garden with fresh fruits and vegetables. Recommend picnic service. If you visit, getting a room that faces the river is a must! Food in restaurant is expensive and bad.. I had my birthday here as well and they didn't do anything for me, which was also upsetting. Taxi should also be reserved for arrival beforehand. If you don't, it's a really hard walk about 150m on a serpantine upwards. Rail station is pretty as well.

A lovely hotel and place to stay . The location is awesome being down into the Douro valley close to the river . Rooms are river facing so a lovely view in the morning . Staff are great and helpful. Food and dining is very good and great quality . The rooms are ok and quite nice but the bathroom design and space could have been better . Is a bit tight and the only thing that lets the room down . Apart from that it’s a lovely place to stay .

Fantastic place to relax, enjoy the views and experience a different Portugal, away from the usual cities. (Also a place for weddings and celebrations). The en prices are so fair and staff is friendly. Having an outdoors pool and an indoor pool is a fantastic part of the experience. The only thing to keep in mind is that the staff seems to guided by local rules. Example: They sent us in a taxi without warning us in advance that the taxi service would not take a credit card or the train service 😊 -- ideally they would warn non-Portuguese travelers who are no longer used to paying with cash. Another example, they forgot our food order and our drinks too. It is not the end of the world, but a small feature as drink of courtesy is the standard practice in good hotels where mistakes are made. Breakfast was very nice and with green views of the mountains and river.

Nice hotel, great food and positioned very well. The only downside was the mattress. It was too soft and gave me a bad back which adjusted after lots of walking. I was informed the mattresses were all renewed 3 years ago and there were no spare ones which was of little help.

The good: The rooms with a river view, especially those lower down nearer the river have a beautifully stunning pastoral river and valley view. So good it is good for the soul. The cafe near the outside pool boasts the same. The restaurant serves excellently prepared and imaginative dishes. . The bad: You can't enjoy your day if you slept on a low quality bed and the mattresses at The Douro Palace are not fit for purpose - they give little support and feel as though they are well "past it". We explained this and the response was uncaring and indifferent. We then asked for the mattresses to be swapped and we're told the hotel did not have any spare mattresses. I said "really, you don't even carry one spare mattress in case of an accident." "No" was the monosyllable reply. So the reception was uncaring, indifferent and told lies. Seemingly visitors to Portugal were, in his opinion, neither welcome nor entitled to a reasonable level of the service for which they had paid. Presumably he thought his wages were paid by the Government and not by tourists. Therefore I am not holding back on this review The restaurant room suffers from having been designed by what I think must have been an extremely unintelligent architect. Overlooking the delightful Douro Valley the architect of this 100% concrete hotel prevented all but one or two of the tables having a view. A few tables are adjacent to a window but the windows are miserably small and placed too high up to afford a view. Presumably this architectural crime can not be undone because everything is reinforced concrete. The indoor pool: To get to the indoor pool you have to be interrogated by a door controlling attendant as to whether you have a swimming cap because, you are instructed, you can't go in the pool without one. You are then offered one of the rubbery things for sale. We have been in hundreds of pools all over the world and not encountered this before. We declined and for the first time ever did not have a few swims Our travelling companions in the adjacent room had to suffer an absence of tranquility (the reason we were there was for tranquility) because of some sort of noisy machine/pump/area air conditioning station next to their room which, on top of the worn out mattress, severely impacted their stay. This is an unintelligent architect's doing so, unlike worn-out mattresses, poses a permanent "Russian Roulette" risk for anyone booking this hotel.