So you have already made the hardest decision – of all the places in the world to get married, you have chosen the Douro! First of all, we of course think this a truly excellent decision, but now that you have made it, you have to decide what time of year to get married. Everyone loves a Summer wedding and of course summertime in the Douro is absolutely fabulous, with endless blue skies, warm enough to sit out at night and very little rainfall, but what about the rest of the year?

Below you can see some numbers showing average temperature highs and lows and average rainfall. As you can see, you get average high temperatures of nearly 15ºc all year round, but this does not really tell the whole story – because you get a lot of sunshine all year, in Winter at midday you can often get a nice peak temperature, but for the rest of the day in can get a lot colder, sometimes dropping to freezing, which is not really a great temperature for lunch on the terrace. In April and November you can up to 11 days per month of rain, although you do get many days with beautiful blue skies!

You really have to draw your own conclusions from these numbers, because the weather does not necessarily make or break a wedding, but of course a lot of our destination wedding clients have chosen Portugal at least in part for the good weather. This does mean however that outside of May to September, there is far more availability with venues and we can typically negotiate very good discounts with the venues on your behalf if you hold your wedding in a less popular month.

As your wedding planner, it is our job to make sure that you have a plan B just in case it does start to rain; so whilst most of the weddings we organise in the Douro have at least part of the event held outside (for example the ceremony and aperitifs), we will have a back-up plan somewhere dry just in case the heavens open…..

One thing to mention for Summer weddings is that the temperatures can sometimes stray very high the further East you travel up the Douro, to the point where you would not really want to be outside without shade. Again this is something that we plan for when setting up a venue. Once the sun has gone down, it is generally very agreeable to be outside however and it can really make a wedding a magical experience if much of it can be held in the open air.

We are here to help you with all these difficult decisions, so please let us know all your doubts and uncertainties and we will do our best to share our knowledge!