Use a phone card. Nothing cheaper.

I am not saying that you will not be able to find public phone booths but they are geting pretty scarce.

Don't need public phones...you can buy prepaid "cards" that have a pin which you can use from any phone.

The OP said a pay phone which I took to be just that.

Public pay phones are a dying commodity. I'm sure you could find one in a pinch, but a cell phone with a local SIM card would be what I would do unless I only had to make a handful of calls.

Don't count on finding handy pay phones.

In this day and age when every 10 year old kid walks around with a mobile phone (probably a smartphone to boot), public pay phones are indeed becoming scarcer and scarcer all over the world and of course you need a phone to trigger a call even with a phone card.

So...probably a mobile phone but it depends a lot on where you wish to call. Calls withi the eu on cell phones have become much much more reasonable but calls from within the eu to outside the eu have been jacked up to make up the revenue although there are some good bargain to be had in some countries such as Great eirIN.

xyz123. So glad to see you post an answer. I think SIM possibilites change so fast.
I am going to Portugal. I use Skype mostly for calls to the US now but still take my quad band phones.

I have been using them locally in Europe mostly to text friends and family when we need to meet at restaurants, etc.
I tend to buy local SIM cards for those calls rather than global ones but they seem to be getting more expensive to use because the rest of my family are not as frugal as I and keep their US numbers and don't think anything of calling on them.

Do you have any new SIM cards up your hat to suggest?

I'm most familiar, of course, with British sim cards which have some real bargains, especially on calling internationally within the UK..logos who seems to hav disappeared every since her prediction that the USD was about to collapse was proven to be nonsensical, had some good ideas for German sim cards but frankly, I have never been to Portugal, hated every minute I spent in Spain (for personal reasons not to demean Spanish peopoe, they're wonderful for the most part) so I can't really help you there.

However, e-kit has some good cards, available on ebay (or at least in the past) which have some good features as far as receiving calls is concerned, not quite as good but better than using a sim card from outside a particular country in another country, for calls to North America.

Understanding, of course, that what we're talking about here is relly outdated wnd generation technology when in many cases we're up to 4th genenration especially for data.