Green Dragon suggesteted I add a more descriptive title

A group of friends and I are traveling to Costa de Caparica, Portugal. We would like to travel to Seville, Spain by train, but have NO idea how to go about it. It would only for a day trip.

Does anyone have any tips or ideas. I saw the Cheat Sheet on here, and am feeling stupid, since I couldn't make heads or tails out of it.
Thank you!!!!

forget

No direct train service between Lisbon and Sevilla.

I don't know where Costa de Caparica is. If it's on the Algarve there's infrequent Bus service to Huelva and Renfe Train service Huelva-Sevilla.

It's very complex to do as a daytrip, although it may be possible especially in Summer months (bus service is more frequent). But even then, Bus Lisbon to Sevilla takes about 6-hrs.

Think about the old:'you can't get there from here' as you make your travel plans

Costa de Caparica is in the South bank of Tagus river.

I correct myself: Costa de Caparica is the beach area in the Atlantic coast, just South of Lisbon.

I wrote the Cheat Sheet

http://www.fodors dot com/forums/threadselect.jsp?fid=2&tid=34823791
( replace the 'dot' with a '.' with no spaces when pasting into your browser window, or use the fodors' search option with the keywords Seville Lisbon Cheat Sheet.)

I welcome any advice you can give as to how to make it better. It's hard to make things clear and simple, though, because making this trip by public transportation frankly isn't. Simple, that is.

Your choices vary depending on the time of year and the day of the week, but believe me, no matter what the circumstances, this is NOT a day trip. In fact it can take more than a day just to go between the two cities., depending on your options. We left Seville at 11:00 by bus on a Sunday in early April, and finally arrived in Faro at 4:30 in the afternoon , Portuguese time (yes, you cross a time zone at the border!) We didn't continue on to Lisbon till the following day (we took an early morning train, and arrived about mid-morning.)

Option 5 in the Cheat Sheet is about train service - i.e. if you want to take the train all the way, you'd have to go via Madrid!

Thank you ALL so much!! Sue, your cheat sheet is great, it was me that was fuzzy brained trying to read it. Thank you very much!!

Yes the Faro-Seville bus is the quickest.

Or you can take trains to the Portugeuse river town and ferry over to Spain town and catch bus to Huelva and train to Seville - only other way via public transportation i believe. And a long day that way.

There is no direct train service between Lisbon and Seville. But there is a direct bus service, run by Alsa. We took that bus from Seville to Lisbon 8 days ago. Very comfortable, and no problems getting a ticket. There were two options, either to take a bus leaving at midnight, or one leaving at 3pm. We opted for the 3 pm bus, and were in Lisbon by 8:30 pm (i.e. 6.5 hours, taking into account the time zone difference). I would imagine that the timings for the return journey are similar, although you can check it out at Alsa's website. And it is cheap: 40 euros for a ticket, and 25% discount if you book 10 days ahead on the net (which we did).

indiancouple, I'm glad to hear from someone for whom the ALSA bus worked. The only trouble with that line is that one must be careful to check the website as they often tinker with the schedules (no daytime bus on Sunday at the time of year we wanted to take it.)

Also really nice to hear that it ran on time. Hope you enjoyed the rest of your trip.

Thanks Sue, we had an excellent trip, and I will be posting a trip report shortly. In our case, the bus actually arrived at Lisbon 45 minutes ahead of schedule, which was nice.