Eating cheaply in Porto Covo
Two places, one number that matters, and a Sunday problem. What the price symbols on a listing site will not tell you.
Every restaurant listing site puts almost every table in Porto Covo in the same price bracket, which tells you nothing at all. Here is the version from someone who eats here.
A Marmita, and the eleven euro plate
A Marmita is the answer to most of this question. Eat in and a full plate is around eleven euros, which in August on this coast is a genuinely good number.
Take away and the things to order are the grilled meat or the choco frito. Real quality at a price that does not feel like a holiday markup, which is a harder combination to find here than it should be.
And order the soup. It sounds like a throwaway line and it is not: the soup is one of the better things they make, and on its own it is close to free.
A Marmita opens 08h00 to 21h00, shortening to 20h00 in winter, and the number is 269 959 054.
Kalunga, at the campsite
The other one is Kalunga, the restaurant at the Parque de Campismo de Porto Covo. People staying in the village tend not to think of walking into the campsite to eat, which is exactly why it stays reasonable.
It runs 07h00 to 23h30 in summer, 09h00 to 22h00 in winter, on 938 492 993.
The Sunday problem
Both of them close on Sunday.
That is the whole warning, and it is not published anywhere else. The two cheapest places to eat in Porto Covo are shut on the same day of the week, and it is the day people most want a takeaway. If you are counting the budget across a week, do your Sunday differently: cook, or accept that Sunday is the night you spend more.
What we are not going to tell you
We are not going to rank the other restaurants by price. The data everyone quotes comes from listing sites, where twelve of the fifteen places we know well carry an identical price band, and that band is meaningless. Building a cheap-eats ranking on it would be inventing a distinction that does not exist in the source.
Two places we can stand behind, and honesty about the rest, is worth more than a list.
Blue Cove is a 3-bedroom apartment in Porto Covo with a private heated pool, let directly by its owners. Check the dates.