The Journal

At the end of May I swam in the Southern Portugal Masters Championships, held over two days at the outdoor fifty metre pool in Loulé. It was my first competition in a swimming pool for twenty-five years. It was thirty seven degrees on the first day, and club tents went up around the grassed area for shade between races. Around two hundred and fifty swimmers from twenty three clubs took part, with teams down from Lisbon and Porto, one from Madeira and a couple from Spain, even

There's a village in the hills above the central Algarve called Alte that I try to take people to when they're ready for something entirely unlike the coast. It's not dramatic. It's not famous. It has a spring, a small church, a couple of cafes, and streets that look more or less exactly as they did fifty years ago. The drive up from the coast takes about forty minutes and passes through the kind of landscape that most Algarve visitors don't know exists, rolling hills, cork o

I've been swimming competitively since I was eight years old. Pool swimming first, then open water, then ocean swimming for the last sixteen years or so. It's the one constant. Wherever I've lived, whatever else has changed, I've always found my way to the water. Arrifana is where I swim when I want to feel the Atlantic properly. It's a bay on the southwest coast, about forty minutes north of Lagos, enclosed by high black cliffs that shelter it from the worst of the north win

The Algarve has a public face and a private one, and they don't correspond to each other particularly well. The public face is summer. The beaches at capacity, the coast road slow, the restaurants fully booked a week ahead. It's not unpleasant, there's an energy to it that has its own appeal, but it's not the place. It's a version of the place operating at unusual intensity for the benefit of people who are mostly somewhere else for the other ten months. The private face is e

Not everything valuable moves quickly. I noticed this properly a few years ago, walking along a quiet stretch of coast near Cabanas with nowhere particular to be. No itinerary, no next stop, just the tide going out and a conversation that had nowhere to rush to. It's stayed with me since, and it's become something close to how I try to live here. Modern life encourages momentum. Productivity. Efficiency. Even leisure can feel scheduled and optimised. But the Algarve has its o

Thomas had been in the Algarve for four days. He was staying in a rented villa with his son, who'd just turned twenty, while his wife was in Lisbon for work. He'd enjoyed the first few days, pool, golf, the obvious things, but his son was restless and he wanted to give him something worth remembering. A contact suggested he get in touch with me. We spoke briefly the evening before. He was interested in history and photography, not particularly excited about beaches for the sa

About twenty minutes north of Faro, in the hills above the coast, there's a small town called São Brás de Alportel that most visitors to the Algarve have never heard of. It was once the centre of the cork trade in southern Portugal. You can still see the old cork factories on the edge of town. It has the slightly prosperous, slightly sleepy quality of places that were once important and have since found a comfortable relationship with being quietly themselves. There's a good

By Rob There's a version of the Algarve that most visitors never see because they're not here for it. It arrives in October. The families have gone home. The restaurants that were fully booked in August have tables again. The beaches are still warm enough to swim from but quiet enough that you can think. The light goes golden earlier and stays that way longer, and the evenings have just enough cool in them to make a jacket feel welcome. I find October to be the best month her

On Saturdays in Loulé there's a covered market that has been running in some form since the nineteenth century. The building is a slightly eccentric neo-Moorish structure in the centre of town. Inside it's all produce, fish, vegetables, cheese, charcuterie, bread, honey, the kind of almond sweets the Algarve has been making since the Moorish period. I go irregularly, usually with someone who wants to understand the region a little better than a restaurant menu can explain it.

From Olhão you can take a ferry to the barrier islands of the Ria Formosa, Culatra, Armona, Farol, and arrive somewhere that feels structurally different from the mainland. No cars. A handful of fishermen's houses. Beaches that go on in both directions and are largely empty outside of August. I tend to go to Culatra. It's the most inhabited of the islands, there's a proper little village with a few restaurants and an easy sense of life carrying on at its own pace. The beach o

A number of the people I spend time with in the Algarve have been coming here for years. In some cases decades. They know the obvious places well and they've stopped going to some of them. The novelty has worn off, which is a natural thing, and what they're looking for now is something less predictable. This is a different kind of visitor from the first-timer working through a list. They don't need orientation. They need redirection. Someone who can say, you've been to Tavira

I had dinner recently at a restaurant in Tavira that I'd been meaning to visit for a while. Mesa Farta, a place near the train station run by a young chef called João Viegas who grew up in Tavira, trained in some of the best kitchens in Europe and recently came home to open his own place. The menu is entirely local in ingredient and very much its own thing in approach. The conversation moved easily between dishes in the way that a good meal makes natural. Not because we tried

There's a point at the southwestern tip of mainland Europe where the land simply ends. Cabo de São Vicente, Cape St Vincent, is a flat headland above cliffs that drop straight into the Atlantic, and standing there on a clear day with the wind coming off the ocean you understand immediately why people once believed this was the edge of the world. It is not a subtle place. There's a lighthouse, a fort, the cliffs, the sea and very little else. In winter the wind can be violent.

There's a fish restaurant in Santa Luzia that has no English on the menu and a chalkboard outside with the day's catch written on it. The tables outside face the lagoon. You arrive, you see what there is, you sit down. It costs almost nothing and it's some of the best seafood in the Algarve. Santa Luzia is five minutes from Tavira. It calls itself the octopus capital of Portugal, which sounds like a joke but is taken seriously by everyone who lives there. The octopus dishes,

I walk a lot in the Algarve. Not in a structured, fitness-tracking way, just the general movement through places that I find helps me think and helps whoever I'm with talk. There's something about walking alongside someone rather than sitting opposite them that changes the quality of conversation. The eye contact becomes optional. There's something to look at other than each other. Silence stops being awkward because you're both watching the same thing, a boat on the river, a

The Algarve has a former capital that most people who visit it don't know about. Silves was the seat of Moorish rule in southern Portugal for centuries, and the castle that still sits above the town is the best preserved in the region. Red sandstone walls that date to the eighth century, with views across the surrounding hills that give you a real sense of what this landscape looked like before the coast became what it is. I've been to Silves many times and it still catches m

Most people who come to the Algarve stay on the coast. Which is understandable, the coast is why they came. But there's a drive I've done a dozen times that I'd recommend to almost anyone, and it goes in completely the opposite direction. Monchique sits in the Serra de Monchique, about forty minutes north of Portimão. The road up from the coast climbs through eucalyptus and cork oak, the temperature drops a few degrees, and somewhere along the way the light changes. By the ti

Moving somewhere takes about six months to stop feeling like a project. The first weeks are practical. Paperwork, finding a doctor, working out which supermarket is worth the drive. Then comes a longer stretch where life looks correct from the outside but hasn't quite settled on the inside. You have a home, you have routines. What you don't yet have is the texture of a place. The knowledge that only arrives with time and, usually, with people. I went through this myself when

There's a restaurant in Cabanas called Noelia e Jeronimo. No terrace overlooking the sea, no particularly dramatic setting. Just an unassuming place on the harbour front run by a self-taught chef who has become something of a legend in this part of Portugal. Some of the country's top chefs drive out from Lisbon to eat there. It's booked weeks in advance in winter. Most visitors to the Algarve have never heard of it. I had lunch there recently with someone who'd been living in