Discover that

To visit Portugal, part of EU, one needs a Schengen visa. We realised that getting Schengen visa via Portugal Embassy would be a relatively easier. Here is our story.

We are based in Manchester for now and wanted to get our visas done for our upcoming July trip. We applied for online visa and we couldn’t find date for June and hence we landed up selecting Portugal Consulate in London as our choice of personal interview venue.

On our interview date at Portugal Consulate,London , here is what we discovered.

You can reach before time and they will let you in. Security staff and other personnels are really nice. 

Once in, it was chaotic but still managed. Crew was wearing all the smiles and trying to help people as much as possible.

Once our turn comes, we get to know entire UK has been divided into several parts based on the region and it falls under separate consulate. E.g. Manchester applicants need to go Manchester based consulate only.

But our stars were aligned and lady was extremely nice, she made an exception and let us apply through London since we told that we were unaware and we just travelled all the way to get it sorted.

She informed that If you have an urgency to travel and if you can’t get appointment dates online, you can reach out in person to any of the consulate and they would be happy to serve you. (This treatment deserves 5 star.)

If further more EU trips are planned post Portugal, list it down in the form and take the prints along. They might give you a longer validity Schengen visa considering you are genuine tourist and is only focussed to travel around EU.

Passports are not handed back immediately. So make sure you carry self paid envelope from Post Office and submit it along with your form. We didn't carry it and had to run to nearby PO to get that.

Funny part is consulate didn’t accept 35 Euro Schengen fee via card. It got to be equivalent GBP cash. So again we ran to get all the cash.