You are reading the English pages of Lauttainfo Portugal, prepared for travellers from abroad; the Portuguese pages at the root of the site are written separately for local readers. Both belong to lauttainfo.com, an independent project whose first guide covered the road ferries of Finland and which now has one for each of several countries. None of us is employed by a boat operator, a municipality, a port or a tourism body, and none of them funds the work. Advertising pays for it.
In Portugal the people behind a crossing vary a great deal. Porto's Douro crossings belong to the metropolitan transport network, the Ria Formosa and Guadiana boats are run by private or concession operators, a regional company sails between the Azores islands, and landing on Berlenga needs a permit from the ICNF. For each line we read the timetable and fares published by whoever operates it, keep a copy stamped with the day we read it, and show that day beside the table.
Typical traps for visitors are not the departure times themselves. They are an island with two landing points, a river boat where a city transport ticket is valid alongside the fare sold on board, or a summer-only service that has simply stopped. Pages are written to make those details obvious, even if you do not speak Portuguese.
Numbers we cannot tie to an official source are left out, whether two operator documents disagree or a price only shows up on a ticket reseller, and the page names the gap. Every crossing also carries a last-checked date and the date of its next scheduled review, because island and river timetables are reissued through the year.
Noticed something that no longer matches the quay? Email [email protected] with the name of the crossing and what you found; we check it against the operator's documents before we edit anything.