Onshore explorations in and around Porbandar brought to light the remains of a Late Harappan settlement dating back to the 16th-14th centuries BCE.

The state was subordinate to the Mughal governor of Gujarat Subah until being overrun by the Marathas in the latter half of the 18th century.

Like most of Gujarat, Porbandar has a hot semi-arid climate (Köppen BSh) with three distinct seasons: the “cool” from October to March, the “hot” in April, May and early June, and the monsoonal “wet” from mid-June to September.

With a coefficient of variation exceeding fifty percent and an expectation of only 41 percent of mean annual rainfall in the driest year in ten, the Porbandar region is among the most variable in the world[5]—comparable to northern Australia, the Brazilian sertão and the Kiribatese Line Islands.

[6] An illustration of Porbandar's extremely variable rainfall can be seen from 1899 to 1905 when seven successive years produced annual falls of: Porbandar, owing to its coastal location, is the least hot of all major cities in Gujarat: Average high temperatures do not reach 35 °C or 95 °F in any month.

[14] As per another assessment in the year 2016, Porbandar ranked the lowest in terms the volume of water supplied per capita at 59 lpcd (liters per capita per day) as compared to Gandhinagar which ranked the highest at 245 lpcd.

Many private coaches are available daily to Rajkot, Dwarka, Veraval, Junagadh, Ahmedabad, Jamnagar, Vadodra, Surat, and Mumbai.

There are daily trains to Rajkot (via Jamnagar, Bhanwad and Upleta, Dhoraji, Gondal as well), Somnath (via Junagadh) and Mumbai (via Ahmedabad, Vadodra and Surat).

There are also trains to Delhi, Muzaffarpur and Howrah connecting to major cities of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Vidarbha and West Bengal.

A weekly train service connects Kochuveli, Thiruvananthapuram (Kerala) and Secunderabad (Hyderabad) with Porbandar via Mangalore, Calicut, Kochi and Quilon(Kollam).