so i finally took the mavic 3 to europe and honestly the experience was way better than i expected in terms of scenery but the airspace stuff nearly gave me a heart attack. i did all my research before leaving, checked dronesafe and all that, but Portugal has some weird quirks that i didnt fully understand until i was already standing on a cliff near sintra trying to figure out if i was in controlled airspace or not.

ended up downloading the ANAC app which is their civil aviation authority thing and it helped a lot but its all in portuguese so good luck if you dont have google translate open at the same time. the good news is most of rural portugal is basically open, the bad news is the entire lisbon area is basically locked down and i had to drive like 40 mins out of the city to get any decent shots without worrying.

anyone else done portugal? curious what spots you found that were actually flyable without jumping through a million hoops

sintra is gorgeous but yeah its basically a no-fly nightmare. i went two years ago with the mini 2 and i think the rules were slightly different then but even so i mostly just gave up trying to fly near the palaces and drove north toward peniche instead. the coastline up there is incredible and i barely saw another person let alone any enforcement. worth the extra drive for sure.

this is why i always email the local aviation authority like a week before i travel. sounds tedious and honestly half the time they dont reply but when they do its gold. saved me a trip to the canary islands once where i thought i was good but turns out there were temporary restrictions over some nature reserve I hadn't seen on any of the apps