As a native Spanish speaker, I would say we can understand most of written portuguese stuff, as well as Portuguese speakers can understand quite a bit of written Spanish. It's a bit more complicated to understand spoken language, but I've been told that Portuguese speakers can understand more spoken Spanish than we can understand them. I think it's because the pronunciation, since for me portuguese speakers have a very particular way of pronuncing the words. At least this is what happens for me with argentinian Spanish (I'm from Argentina) and brazilian Portuguese. Maybe between people from Spain and Portugal it is easier to communicate, as Andres has pointed out.