Loulé Market

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. The market does something that other experiences don't. It shows you what people here actually eat. Not what they cook for visitors. What they buy on a Saturday morning.

We went last spring. Spent an hour moving between stalls, tried things without any particular plan, ended up with bread and local honey and sitting on a bench outside. One of those mornings that costs almost nothing and is difficult to improve on.

Loulé itself is worth a wander after the market. The old town is intact in a way that Albufeira, for example, isn't, and there's a castle and a good café on the square that I've been to enough times to feel at home in.

The drive from the coast takes twenty minutes. Most people never make it.