Booked 2 months. Rained for 6 weeks. Still liked it. Clearly something is wrong with me.

Co-Living in Porto 2022

If anyone tells you Porto in autumn is great, they’re probably right. I wouldn’t know. I saw it mostly through wet glass.

I stayed for two months — October and November 2022. Eight weeks total, roughly six of which were dedicated to continuous, aggressive rainfall. Not the polite Lisbon kind, where the weather app says “rain all day” and you get a light mist that evaporates before it hits your jacket. No. Porto rain is a creative mix of biblical downpour, horizontal storm, and the vague feeling that your clothes will never be fully dry again.

Devastating, honestly.

The City (What I Saw of It)

The first few days were stable and sunny, as if Porto was putting on a show before revealing its true autumn personality. I explored. A lot, actually. And look — the city is brilliant.

It’s not as big as Lisbon, not as crowded, and has the kind of quiet confidence that comes from not needing to prove anything. Beautiful old town. A proper river coastline. Beaches that would be genuinely impressive if you could see them through the rain.

Tourists exist, obviously, but they concentrate in about four predictable hotspots: the old town, the Douro riverbank and monastery, the city beach, and the area around Jardins do Palácio de Cristal. Avoid those and you’re mostly among locals. Which I prefer (the introvert’s way of saying “fewer people to accidentally make eye contact with”).

The Rain (A Character Study)

Then the rain arrived. And stayed. And brought friends.

Everyone who passed through our coliving space during those weeks — arrived in rain, stayed three days, left traumatised — probably thinks Porto is a terrible city. They’d be wrong, but I understand the conclusion. When your entire experience of a place is sprinting between doorways, the nuance gets lost.

I, on the other hand, had committed to two months. No escape plan. The kind of decision that feels adventurous in August and deeply questionable in November.

The Coliving (A Controlled Experiment in Isolation)

The Outsite space itself was lovely. Quiet residential area. A dozen small apartments. A big outdoor area that would’ve been perfect if the outdoors hadn’t declared war on us.

On paper, ideal for a workaholic. Self-contained apartments, a coworking area with desks, a chill-out zone. Everything you need to be productive and sociable.

Spoiler: the self-contained apartments were the problem.

Here’s the thing about coliving — the whole point is the “co” part. And for that to work, you need a shared space people are essentially forced into. Usually a kitchen. Somewhere you bump into each other while making coffee, exchange three sentences about the weather (grim), and accidentally become friends.

These apartments had their own kitchens. Their own everything, really. So unless you made a deliberate effort to leave your perfectly comfortable little cave and walk through the rain to the common area… you just didn’t.

When the sun was out, it worked. People emerged, set up laptops in the shared space, nodded at each other in that universal remote-worker greeting. But once the rain settled in permanently, we all retreated to our apartments like hermit crabs.

Sometimes it felt like being back in covid lockdown. You knew you had neighbours. You’d heard them exist. Occasionally you’d spot one making a dash to the bins. But actual human contact required a level of initiative that competing with a warm apartment and dry socks simply couldn’t justify.

The kind of social experiment where everyone independently arrives at the same conclusion: maybe tomorrow.