São Brás de Alportel

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 pousada there, a market on Saturday mornings, and a quality of light in the late afternoon that comes from being elevated above the coastal haze. The countryside around it, cork oak, carob trees, the occasional almond, is genuinely beautiful in a way that requires no particular effort to appreciate.

I went there for lunch last year with someone who was spending two weeks in the Algarve and had decided by day four that they'd seen the main things. We drove up through the hills and ate at a restaurant where the clientele was almost entirely local and the menu had changed very little in twenty years. The kind of place that doesn't need to try.

She said on the way back that she'd stopped thinking of the Algarve as a coastal thing. Which is the correct response to São Brás. The coast is wonderful. But the interior has been there longer and cares considerably less about impressing anyone.