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Taking a tour of Portugal and holiday cottages:
If you are looking to slow down and do precious little for a few days, that is exactly what a villa or cottage holiday in Portugal offers. You wake up when the light decides to wake you, not when an alarm does. You make coffee in a kitchen that is not quite yours and feels borrowed from a friend who has excellent taste in wall tiles. You step outside and the air smells of sea salt, or oranges, or woodsmoke from last night’s bread oven. It’s a particular kind of luxury, and it doesn’t have to cost the earth. Portugal has been really good at this sort of holiday. The Algarve still draws the crowds, and rightly so. The coastline between Lagos and Tavira is full of whitewashed cottages that look like they have been bleached by centuries of sun. To the north, the Alentejo unfolds in all directions like a golden blanket, full of farmsteads converted into simple, beautiful places to stay. And then there is the Douro Valley, where terraced vineyards rise up on hillsides and stone houses stand atop the river as if they were also monitoring the passing wine barges. And even the Azores, out in the Atlantic, embrace the self-catering lifestyle, with old whaling cottages on Sao Miguel serving as snug bases for walking the crater lakes. The accommodation itself is very much a mix. At the top end you might find yourself in a restored manor house near Sintra, complete with a pool that almost disappears into the horizon and a housekeeper who leaves pastel de nata on the counter every morning. These places understand luxury is not just about thread count. It is about space. It is about being able to read a book in a garden without hearing someone else’s conversation through a hotel wall. At the other end of the scale budget travellers can find charming, slightly wonky cottages in inland villages where the shower may be temperamental but the landlord will bring you a basket of tomatoes and a bottle of rough local wine that tastes better than anything you have paid twenty pounds for at home. Both have their place. Both teach you something about how the Portuguese live. And that, really, is the joy of it. If you stay in a villa or cottage, you’re forced to get in a relationship with the place. You go to the local market not for a tourist attraction but because you want to have some dinner. You know the fishmonger in Olhao is open only until midday and a baker in a hilltop Alentejo village closes on Wednesdays for no reason other than tradition. The cuisine changes drastically as you go around the country. The Algarve gives you grilled sardines and cataplana, that wonderful seafood stew steamed in a copper pot. In the north, around Porto, you have caldo verde and francesinha sandwiches that need to be nap-inducing, all of them too. The interior has migas and black pork, good food for people who work the land. Eating it on your own terrace, with wine from the cooperative down the road, is entirely different from eating at a restaurant, however good that restaurant might be. There are moments of these holidays which are in the air. I remember sitting on the terrace of a cottage at Monchique, high up in the hills above the Algarve coast, watching the mist roll through the eucalyptus trees. The nearest neighbour was half a kilometre away. A dog barked somewhere then the silence was thick and green and full of life. And it was the kind of silence that makes you feel like your own breathing. You reflect, naturally, on how noisy your life is. How strange it is to feel guilty for doing nothing, and how quickly that guilt evaporates when the only deadline is sunset. The contrast is part of the pleasure, too, of course. You can drive down these remote hills and in an hour you’ll be in Lagos or Albufeira, where the coastal towns are full of life. The beaches are packed with families, cafes spill onto pavements and sunscreen is fused with frying fish. It is chaotic, loud, sometimes overwhelming and absolutely necessary. You need the bustle to appreciate the quiet and give you the energy to face the bustle. Walking through a market in a busy town after three days of almost silence feels like returning to the human race, slightly refreshed and slightly smug, so the people you meet always stay with you. There is the taciturn farmer who smiles at you as he checks his irrigation channels in the morning, an entire philosophy of life in one gesture. There are the chatty cafe owners who want to know where you are from and will not let you walk away until you have tried their wife’s presunto. There are the British and Dutch expats who live in the Algarve and are playing at the local pub quiz with such confidence that it’s almost performance art. Then there was Senhor Manuel. I met him in a village near Castelo de Vide in eastern Alentejo. He was in his 70s, and had a suit that hadn’t seen a dry cleaner in the nineties, and he seemed to have taken on the role of the unofficial mayor of the lane where our cottage stood. He would check our car every morning as if it were a horse he was considering buying, pressing his hand on the bonnet and muttering. One day he had come in and offered me a jar of honey from his own bees, then spent twenty minutes explaining with some elaborate hand gestures that the bees were lazy in August and we should not judge the honey too harshly. When we offered to pay, he seemed instantly offended, and asked if we had any English tea bags. We gave him five. He unwrapped one, sniffed it suspiciously and walked away shaking his head as if we had just handed him a dead leaf. He never spoke English, I did not speak much Portuguese, but we understood each other. That is the good thing about a villa holiday in Portugal. You get these little unscripted interactions that no all-inclusive resort can create. You are not insulated from the place. You are in it, however briefly. You shop where locals shop, you get lost on roads not in your satnav, you eat dinner watching the swallows dive above a swimming pool that is probably too cold but you get in anyway because the heat of the day demands it. After a few days, you start to understand why the Portuguese are so good at this. They have never rushed. They have always understood that the good life is not accumulation but attention. Pay attention to food, to light, to the person in front of you, to the exact colour of the ocean at five in the afternoon. You will return from that with sand in your shoes, probably a bit of sunburn, and perhaps a jar of honey or a bottle of wine you’re saving for a rainy Tuesday when it is necessary to remember that life is this simple. You will book it again. Everyone does.
Have a great vacation in Portugal from the EUCottages travel team
