As a speaker of both Portuguese (mother tongue, native) and Spanish (father, not native anymore) with a Catalan connection (dad was from Barcelona and I lived there for a few months, amazing language, love it to bits), I would say these two languages are closer to each other than Italian to Portuguese. But never as close to consider them the same I can assure you :).
In fact, even European Portuguese can be a bit hermetic to understand although they understand Brazilian Portuguese better. This is all down to the fact that they import more cultural products such as books and TV programmes from Brazil than the other way around. European Portuguese speakers say that the way we tonalise and inflect the language is softer but I believe that they understand us due to exposure to the language which in turn teaches them to decipher our pronunciation and the Brazilian linguistic idiosyncracies.
