Algarve

The Algarve occupies the southernmost strip of Portugal, a coastal band closed off to the north by a line of hills separating it from the Alentejo. Two coasts meet here that look nothing alike: to the east, the Sotavento shelters behind the Ria Formosa, a system of lagoons and low sandbar islands that storms reshape from one season to the next; to the west, the Barlavento exposes its limestone cliffs directly to the Atlantic, hollowed by caves and arches that erosion keeps reworking. Between the two, the region changes tone almost village by village. It is a golden limestone, almost ochre in the evening light, that makes up most of the Barlavento shoreline, and it is on this stone that the white houses the region is known for were built. Their lime-washed walls carry a signature found nowhere else in Portugal: the chaminé algarvia, a small tower of pierced, ornately worked plaster, inherited from an architecture that arrived with the Moors, who occupied the region for centuries — their name, in fact, survives in that of the province, Al-Gharb, 'the west' of the medieval Arab world. In Tavira, houses kept flat roof terraces, the açoteias, once used to dry fish; in Olhão, stacked cubic façades give the town a North African look that has long been noted. Azulejo tiles reappear here and there on façades, more sparingly than in Lisbon or Porto. The interior splits into two bands as well. Just behind the coast, the Barrocal shares the same limestone as the cliffs and carries orchards of almond, fig, carob and orange trees, planted in a pale soil that holds water poorly yet returns it as dense fruit. Further north, the Serra changes both ground and vegetation: schist takes over, covered in cork oak and eucalyptus, and a few windmills, long since stopped, recall a time when grain was carried uphill to be ground, away from the coast. The contrast between the two bands is visible at a glance from higher ground: a tended garden near the sea, dry open scrub above it. A stay in the Algarve is almost always built around a white house, its courtyard or terrace shaded by a lemon tree, and a simple rhythm of mornings at the beach and evenings in the village. On the eastern coast, the sandbar islands of the Ria Formosa are reached by boat, out of reach of any car, for a beach the tide keeps redrawing. On the western coast, wilder and far less built up, the rhythm changes: the cliffs rise higher, the wind is more present, and the water stays noticeably colder, carried in by a current rising from the open ocean — it is not the same sea as the sheltered one to the east, and the two rarely blend into a single day. The Algarve has no alpine relief and no large city: the region keeps its promise within a narrow band, between one coast and the other. What people come looking for is the white of the houses set against golden limestone, a cove reached down steps cut into the rock, and that constant back-and-forth between two shorelines turning their backs on each other — one facing a sheltered, mild sea, the other the open Atlantic, with neither one really standing for the whole region.