Silves

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 me slightly off guard. You drive through the orange groves, cross the medieval bridge over the Arade river, and arrive in a town that simply hasn't been swallowed by tourism in the way that so much of the Algarve has. There are good cafés, a covered market, streets that go up and down in the way that old towns do, and almost none of the visual noise that comes with heavily visited places.

I went with someone last spring who'd been coming to the Algarve for twenty years and had somehow never made it to Silves. We walked up to the castle in the morning before it got hot, spent an hour on the walls looking out at the hills, then came back down and had lunch somewhere on the square. She kept saying she couldn't believe she'd never come.

That's something I hear fairly often. People discover that the place they thought they knew has an entire interior life they've been driving past for years.

Silves is about forty minutes from most of the coast. It's worth every minute of the drive.