There are several options open to you when you want to phone home. You can use your British or Irish mobile phone, but it is really expensive and if it is a pay as you go phone, once your credit runs out, you cannot get a top-up card here. In that situation, the only thing you can do, is get someone back home to buy credit for you.
There are usually telephone booths in your hotel or some exchange bureaux, whereby you are charged at the end of your call. This makes it difficult to know how much you´re spending and you may get a nasty shock!
The standard public phone boxes are the freestanding (not attatched to the wall of a bar or shop) blue and green Telefonica phones. They are also the cheapest. These phones take coins and Telefonica cards which are available at Tobacconists. These are inserted into the slot. Other phonecards are available at souvenir shops, which claim to be cheaper, but which involve scratching off a secret code and entering a long series of numbers, before you can make a call.
When using coins, the minimum connection charge to Britain or Ireland, is about 0.50 cents, put a small coin in first, to make sure it´s working, when that registers on the screen put in the rest, keep some 1.00 euros, 50 and 20 cent coins ready.Then dial.
To phone Britain dial:
00 44 (then the code, missing out the first 0) then the number
To phone Ireland dial:
00 353 (then the number you are calling)
To phone a mobile phone back home dial:
00 44 (or 353 for Ireland) miss out the first digit, then dial the rest of the number