Clerigos tower: 225 steps, not 200, and the night ticket costs half

225 steps, and two of the top results say 200

Google shows Clerigos Tower how many steps as a related search for this term, and the People Also Ask box asks it outright. It is the question people have. So here is the answer, from the monument: 225 steps, 75 metres, six floors.

That figure is worth stating plainly because the pages Google ranks above this one do not agree with it.

The two sites that rank fourth and fifth, both of which exist to sell or steer tickets, get the step count wrong. One says 200 and rounds the height up to 76 metres; the other says "200+", which is true of 225 but is not an answer.

And the one that gets the steps right gets the price wrong. A widely shared Facebook post says "225 steps and 8 EUR to get the best view in all of Porto". The steps are correct. The ticket is 10.00 EUR, and has been at least since 24 September, when this site first read it for the things to do guide.

The fourth result is not the monument, and it shows

Reading those pages in full rather than trusting their search snippets turned up something worth a section of its own. The site Google ranks fourth, clerigos-tower.com, is not the monument. Every button on it leads to a ticket reseller with its own affiliate tag attached, and the file holding its own logo is named, in its own words, unofficial.

None of that is wrong in itself. This site also carries affiliate links and says so. What matters is what the page then tells you:

• It describes lifts that do not exist. The page twice mentions avoiding "elevator queues". There is no lift. It is 225 steps, and the same page says in another section that the climb is unsuitable for wheelchairs and pushchairs because of the stairs.
• It closes the monument half an hour early. It gives the opening hours as 09:00 to 18:30. The monument publishes 09:00 to 19:00, and because last entry is 30 minutes before closing, believing the wrong one costs you the last half hour of the day.
• It advertises a ticket that does not exist. It offers "Clérigos Tower & Museum: Entry Ticket" from 5 EUR. There is no 5 EUR ticket that includes the museum: the 5 EUR one is the night ticket, tower only, and only on special dates.

The lift is the one that gives it away. A page that tells you to come early to avoid the queue for a lift that does not exist, in a tower whose whole proposition is climbing 225 steps, has not been written by anyone who went. And it is the fourth thing Google offers you when you ask about this monument.

Every ticket, and what each one includes

There are three combined tickets, and one of them is worth the arithmetic.

The SPIRITUS combination costs 19 EUR, against 22 bought separately. SPIRITUS is the videomapping show projected inside the church, which sells for 12 EUR on its own and which our Christmas guide looks at in detail, including the fact that it is rated 4.37 from 275 reviews, the lowest of anything this site has compared in Porto. Three euros saved, on a show worth checking before you commit to it.

Porto Card holders and residents of Porto get 50 per cent off the day ticket, which brings it to 5.00 EUR, the same as the night ticket.

The night ticket costs half

Of the pages ranking for this search, only one mentions this at all, and it is not either of the two that sell tickets. There is a night ticket at 5.00 EUR, exactly half the 10.00 of the day one. It runs from 19:00 to 23:00.

Two conditions, and both matter. It only exists on special dates: Easter, the summer season and Christmas. And it buys the tower alone, not the museum. So it is not a cheaper version of the same visit: it is a different, shorter one, at night, for half the money.

If what you want is the view, that is the ticket. If you want the museum and the church as well, the day ticket is the only one that includes them. Last entry is always 30 minutes before closing, whichever you buy.

The organ concert nobody mentions

The church holds two Iberian pipe organs built simultaneously in 1774 and restored in 2014, with the trumpets arranged horizontally, which is what distinguishes the Iberian type. There is a concert on them every single day at noon, and it is included with the ticket.

There is also mass, and mass is not ticketed: every Saturday at 17:00 in English and every Sunday at 21:30 in Portuguese. If you want to see the inside of the church without buying anything, that is how, with the obvious caveat that a mass is a service and not a visit.

The monument also publishes a free 360 degree virtual tour of the complex, which is a reasonable way to decide whether 225 steps are your idea of an afternoon.

Who gets in free

A longer list than most monuments publish, and it is on their ticket page with the requirement that you show ID: clergy, uniformed scouts with prior booking, the army, the navy, the air force, the PSP and GNR police forces, war veterans, and anyone with a recognised disability of 60 per cent or above. A companion of the latter gets 50 per cent off.

Children under ten are free on any ticket, which with 225 steps and no lift is a detail worth pairing with the obvious question of whether they will want to climb them.

Where it is, and what is 160 metres away

Rua de Sao Filipe de Nery, in the historic centre. It is 160 metres from Livraria Lello, which is why the two appear together in every itinerary ever written about Porto, and why it is worth being clear that they are separate tickets, separate queues and separate things: the bookshop is 15.95 EUR and redeemable against a book, the tower is 10.00 and redeemable against nothing.

The tower is also the highest point of the walk measured in our three day itinerary, where the standard first day descends 148 metres from this part of the city down to the river. If you are climbing 225 steps, do it before the descent rather than after.

The tour that includes the tower, compared

Walking tour with Lello, river cruise and cable car

Price

From 59.99 EUR

Duration

4 hours

Rating

★★★★★ 4.89 from 5,214

Does not include the Clerigos tower, and is here for that reason: it bundles Lello, the cruise and the cable car, so if the tower is what you want, the 10 EUR ticket at the door is the thing to buy.

Price checked 29 Sep 2026

Check availability

What this page does not tell you

Nobody from this site has climbed the tower. Everything above is published by the monument or counted against what other sites publish. Specifically:

• No queue times and no verdict on the view. With over 1.5 million visitors a year there is clearly a queue at some hours, and we have not measured which.
• No idea how long the climb takes. 225 steps on a narrow baroque staircase is not a figure you can convert into minutes from a desk.
• The night ticket dates are not a calendar. The monument says Easter, summer and Christmas without publishing exact dates, so check before you plan an evening around it.
• Prices change. These were read on 6 October 2026 and match what the same site published on 24 September, but the ticket office is the only thing that binds.

Where these figures come from

Steps, height, floors, visitor numbers and the history come from torredosclerigos.pt, the monument's own site, read on 6 October 2026. Prices come from its ticket office page, same day. The ratings are Google's and GetYourGuide's, as shown in the search results for the monument.

The figures attributed to other sites were read on their own pages, in full, the same day, from the results Google returns for clerigos tower in the United Kingdom. Not from the snippets: a snippet would not have shown the lift that does not exist. The script that holds all of it is datos/clerigos.py, and it prints the comparison so the discrepancies can be checked rather than taken on trust.

Questions

Header photograph: Portugal Porto Clerigos Church Tower by Medullaoblongata Projekt, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped to fit.

About this guide

Written by Diego Fresno, who counted the Clerigos steps against four sources that do not agree, and found the night ticket nobody publishes. Verified quarterly: last review September 2026. About the author →