Hotel Vila Galé Serra da Estrela — Hotel in Manteigas

We stayed here as a family in mid-July. It’s a great modern hotel in a very convenient location. All the beauty of Serra da Estrela is easily accessible by car, provided the main roads aren’t closed due to rockfalls.

The hotel truly lives up to its 4-star rating: clean, well-maintained, and contemporary. The views are breathtaking, especially from the restaurant. Breakfasts are of high quality and feature plenty of local products — cheeses, jams, cold cuts. The outdoor jacuzzi overlooking the mountains is fantastic, and the outdoor pools have refreshingly cool water for a comfortable swim. If that’s too much, the indoor pool is there to balance it out. During the day, you can also grab decent sandwiches at the bar. My family absolutely loved the experience.

However, my own stay was overshadowed by the air conditioning in the room. The hotel uses central air, and there’s no way to adjust the airflow direction. As a result, the stream of cold air blows directly onto the bed. After swimming in the outdoor pool, I fell asleep under the 26°C air blowing right on me and ended up catching a bad cold. Judging by other reviews, I wasn’t the only guest with this issue.

So, if your immune system can handle air conditioning, you’ll probably have a wonderful time here. But personally, I doubt I...

It's a beautiful 4-year-old hotel in a stunning area. The lobby is a nice place to relax and the pool/garden area is beautiful. We enjoyed the buffet breakfast and also a buffet dinner one night (not usually our style, but they had a lot of interesting local-ish stuff to try, e.g., rabbit stew). The "family room" was just barely large enough to hold a double bed and a folded-out sofa bed. If you're coming here with kids you really will need to get two rooms, I think. At least our "family room" had no desk and the lobby also has no standard-height tables so there isn't a great place to set up a laptop and work except maybe you could do it in the restaurant. There is no business center. Internet service was only fair and there were enough interruptions to make voice and video calls impractical. After a thunderstorm our last night, Internet service to the entire town was apparently knocked out.

Friendly staff who are competent with English.

Caveat: Don't count on swimming in the outdoor pool if you're from Florida. It's not heated! The indoor pool is toasty warm, but...

A nice cosy hotel on Manteigas. The place is new and it's on a really pleasant location. It has some room for improvement: the a/c on the rooms is over the bed so you might get cold after a while. Turning it off means that you need to get of the bed to switch off, just to a couple of minutes afterwards get up again to turn it on, since the room will get really hot. The pool outside is quite small which is a real inconvenience on the current covid state and you'll only get sun there until 18h00 (summer). If you're going to the gym bring your sunglasses otherwise you won't be able to be on the machines near the window. Everything is continuously being clean and the staff is...