Whilst a lot of our clients have fallen in love with northern Portugal and have their hearts set on getting married here, we know that many prospective clients know that they would like to get married somewhere warm and romantic in southern Europe but are not quite sure where. On this site you can regularly find us banging the drum for what a fabulous spot northern Portugal is for a weddings, with the fabulous scenery, great food, historic buildings, welcome of the local people, great access and so on, but in this post we are going to talk about euros and cents. Yes that’s right, the cost of a wedding is always a major consideration for all of our clients and we would like to make the case that you will struggle to find better value for money elsewhere in the south of Europe than in northern Portugal.

Finding data for the average cost of a wedding is pretty much impossible to do, but you can use the price of 4 star hotels and the average price of a meal for two in a mid-range restaurant as a realistic proxy for what you might spend on a wedding. After all the cost of the wedding venue and the food and drink are the main costs fo a wedding. So let’s have a look at the data that is available for France, Spain, Italy and Portugal. First of all the average cost of 4 star accommodation according to Mabrian data from 2022:

Country	Average cost of a 4* Hotel double room	Price index
France	€173	125
Italy	€161	117
Spain	€145	105
Portugal	€138	100

This data is obviously not perfect, but it helps to give a ballpark figure for accommodation costs – as well as looking at the value in euros, you can also look at the values indexed in comparison to Portugal, where you can see for example that Italy is 17% more expensive than Portugal.

Now looking at the price of a mid-range meal for two according to Numbeo data for 2024 – in this case it is done by cities, which again is a very rough proxy for what you might expect to pay to eat out:

City	Meal Price	Price Index
Paris	€75.73	157
Rome	€70.32	146
Barcelona	€64.91	135
Porto	€48.14	100

Of course this data has to be taken with a pinch of salt, as large cities can disguise regional variations and so on, but the values are nevertheless illustrative of a very clear point: Porto is by far the lowest cost location for eating out.

The real issue here is not whether one country or location is better than an other for whatever reason, but that your wedding budget will typically go a lot further in northern Portugal than it would elsewhere in similar European destinations, which can either mean you can do your wedding for less or you will be able to afford to upgrage your wedding here in northern Portugal.

The price that clients will pay for their wedding can be a difficult issue for wedding planners to handle, because in can be a bit unromantic discussing all the details of your dream day with your wedding planner and always coming down to the price of everything. The way we work here at Porto Weddings is generally to start with a budget price for a particular venue for a typical package and then go through it with the client line by line where we will itemise each item and give a price to it – that way you will know exactly what you are paying for every element and you can decide what is more important to you and where you want to spend your budget.

There are some lucky couples who may have a limitless budget for their wedding and that is a wonderful thing – but for the vast majority you will have to decide how you want to distribute your budget and it is our job as wedding planners to understand your priorities and concept for the wedding and give you the prices to help you make the best decisions. The great thing about coming to northern Portugal for your wedding is that your budget will generally stretch a fair bit further, which means you won’t have to make some of the frustrating trade-offs that you really didn’t want to make! If you want to find more about the planning a wedding in northern Portugal, please get in touch and we will set you up for a free first consultation.