Porto Airport Guide: Northern Portugal’s Atlantic Gateway
Porto Airport, officially Francisco Sa Carneiro, is Portugal's second busiest airport and a Ryanair, easyJet and TAP base. Routes, metro access and spotting.
By The Aviation Hub
7 min read
Updated October 20, 2026 
Porto Airport, officially Francisco Sa Carneiro Airport and still called Pedras Rubras by many locals, sits about 7 miles (11 km) north west of the centre of Portugal’s second city, close to the Atlantic coast at Maia. It is the second busiest airport in the country after Lisbon and the main gateway to the north of Portugal and Galicia across the Spanish border. Close to 17 million passengers a year use a single runway and a single terminal, a building that opened in 2006 and has collected a string of ACI awards since.
Porto Airport at a Glance
The IATA code is OPO and the ICAO code is LPPR. The airport straddles the boundaries of Maia, Matosinhos and Vila do Conde, roughly 7 miles (11 km) from the city centre at Aliados, at an elevation of 69 m (228 ft). There is one runway, 17/35, and one terminal, with a separate cargo terminal and a general aviation area on the eastern side.
Porto Airport handled around 15.9 million passengers in 2024 and a record 16.9 million in 2025, a long way past the 10 million mark it first crossed in December 2017. Ryanair is the largest airline and has one of its biggest Iberian bases here, with easyJet, TAP Air Portugal and TAP Express also based. ANA Aeroportos de Portugal, owned by the French group Vinci since 2013, operates the airport under a 50 year concession. Flight and parking information is on the airport’s official website.
How Porto’s Airport Came to Be
Pedras Rubras Airport opened in 1945 on former farmland, taking its name from the locality, which means red rocks. The site was chosen for its flat ground close to the coast and the city. For decades it was a modest regional field, with TAP providing the links to Lisbon and the emigrant routes to France, Switzerland and Germany that mattered to the north’s economy.
The name changed in 1990 to honour Francisco Sa Carneiro, the Portuguese prime minister killed in December 1980 when his Cessna 421 crashed shortly after take off from Lisbon on a flight to Porto. The crash, which also killed the defence minister, remains the subject of debate in Portugal. A new terminal was designed by the ICQ practice and built between 2003 and 2006, opening in late 2006, a few months after the Porto Metro reached the airport in May.
The low cost era transformed the place. Ryanair opened its base in 2009 and grew it into a major operation, easyJet followed, and traffic more than tripled in fifteen years. ACI named it the best airport in Europe in 2007 and placed it in the top three nine more times. A 2021 incident in which a Boeing 737 took off while a vehicle was on the runway was a rare operational scare.
Runways at Porto Airport
Porto Airport has a single asphalt runway, 17/35, which is 3,480 m (11,417 ft) long and 45 m wide. The length is generous for an airport dominated by Boeing 737-800 and Airbus A320neo aircraft, and it easily handles the wide bodies flying to North America and Brazil. The runway runs almost north to south, parallel to the nearby coastline, which places the approaches over the beaches and suburbs rather than the city itself.
Northerly winds, the nortada that blows down the Portuguese coast through summer, mean runway 35 is in use for most of the warm months, with arrivals over Matosinhos and the former Leca da Palmeira refinery. Winter south westerlies bring runway 17 into use, with approaches over Vila do Conde. Atlantic fog can disrupt operations in autumn and winter, and the airport has Category II instrument landing. There is no second runway and the surrounding housing leaves little room for one.
Terminals and Airlines
The 2006 terminal is a long rectangular building with a dramatic cantilevered roof, check in on the upper level and a pier of contact gates stretching south along the apron. It has since been extended with remote stands and additional gates, which explains the bus boarding that Ryanair passengers know well. The airside area is divided into Schengen and non Schengen zones, with the ANA lounge as the main premium option.
Ryanair is by some distance the largest airline at Porto Airport, flying a dense network of European routes with Boeing 737-800 and 737 MAX 8-200 aircraft. easyJet is second, with TAP Air Portugal third and running the Lisbon shuttle plus Paris, Luxembourg and Zurich. Star Alliance is represented by TAP, Lufthansa, Brussels Airlines and Swiss, SkyTeam by Air France and KLM, and oneworld by British Airways and Iberia. Azores Airlines, Vueling, Wizz Air and Transavia France fill out the picture.
Routes and Destinations
Lisbon is the busiest route, with around a million passengers a year on the TAP shuttle, despite the high speed Alfa Pendular train. Madrid, Paris Orly, Geneva and Barcelona follow, each carrying between about 690,000 and 970,000 passengers in 2019. The French and Swiss routes serve the Portuguese diaspora, which still fills flights to Paris, Lyon, Geneva and Luxembourg every summer and Christmas.
London is split across Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and Luton, and Ryanair’s network reaches deep into Germany, Italy and Poland. Long haul is modest but growing: TAP flies to Newark, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, United adds a summer Newark service, Air Transat serves Toronto and Montreal, Azores Airlines reaches Boston and Toronto via Ponta Delgada, and there are seasonal charters to Punta Cana. The Sao Paulo service, at around 5,100 miles (8,200 km), is the longest. Summer and the December holidays are the peaks. Cargo is light, handled through a small dedicated terminal.
Getting to and from Porto Airport
Line E of the Porto Metro, the violet line, runs from a station beside the terminal to Trindade in the city centre in around 30 minutes, with some trains continuing to Campanha for mainline services. A Z4 Andante ticket, including the reusable card, costs around 2.60 euros (£2.20), making the metro the cheapest sensible option and the most reliable. Trains run frequently from early morning to past midnight.
STCP buses 601 and 602 serve the city, and the 3M night bus fills the gap when the metro stops. GetBUS coaches run to Braga and Guimaraes in about 50 minutes, and a daily bus crosses the border to Vigo. Drivers arrive from the A41 and A28 motorways, which connect to the A4 and A3, and a taxi to the centre costs roughly 20 to 25 euros. The short stay car park faces the terminal and the long stay options are a short walk away. A proposed Porto to Vigo high speed railway would pass through the airport, though it remains a plan.
Spotting and Photography
The best known spot at Porto Airport is the hill beside Rua da Fábrica, close to Rua das Bicas, which covers every movement on 17/35. A tunnel under the runway leads to a second hill by a crash gate on the western side, with a view over the fence. The departure lounges overlook the runway and gates, and National Road 107 beside the perimeter looks across the remote stands. Runway 35 arrivals can be photographed from the car park south of the terminal.
Morning light suits the Rua da Fábrica hill and the runway 35 car park, while the western hill is best after lunch. The variety is mostly Ryanair and easyJet, but TAP A330neos, the Azores Airlines A321neo LR and the occasional charter wide body provide interest, as do state Falcon jets and visiting Antonov and Ilyushin freighters. Stay on public roads, keep clear of the crash gates and respect residents in the streets around the thresholds.
What Comes Next
Vinci and ANA have a master plan to expand the terminal, starting with 14 new boarding gates, and the government has spoken of a longer term goal of 30 million passengers a year. The airport’s role is also being reshaped by the long argument over Lisbon’s new airport, since Porto has grown faster than the capital in recent years. The planned high speed line to Lisbon and Vigo would bring a railway station to the airport and extend its catchment across the Spanish border.
Porto Airport is heading for 20 million passengers on a single runway, driven by low cost growth and a diaspora that keeps coming home. Compare it with Lisbon and the other Iberian gateways on our Airports of the World map.
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