(Silves)
It’s no secret that come
summer, the alluring coastline of southern Portugal — better known as the
Algarve — practically sags under the crush of holidaymakers who throng its
vacation villages, resort hotels, marinas, 18-hole links, beachwear boutiques,
souvenir emporiums, seaside cafes and seasonal discos.
Blame the
Algarve’s good looks. Stretching from the Spanish border nearly 100 miles along
the Atlantic coast to the very southwestern tip of the Continent, the seaside
is blessed with windswept dunes, powdery sands, ocher cliffs and natural
grottoes. The seafood can be sublime and the prices extremely modest,
especially compared with summer havens like Italy’s Amalfi Coast or the French
Riviera.
With such an
irresistible cocktail of scenery and values, it’s no wonder that some two
million foreigners — primarily from Britain — flood these expanses like the
Allies storming Normandy on D-Day. Some two-thirds of the flights to Faro, the
gateway to the region, arrive from London, Leeds, Liverpool, Dublin and their
neighbors, transforming popular towns like Albufeira into variants of Brighton
with more powerful UV rays. Menus feature fish and chips. English Premier
League football matches flicker from screens in bars. No euros in your pocket?
Just pay in pounds sterling.
The human density
of high summer was conjured most vividly as I gazed out from the terrace of the
Bela Vista Hotel & Spa, a Moorish-style mansion surrounded by charmless
high-rise hotels on a cliff overlooking the enormous Praia da Rocha beach.
“In July and
August, you can’t find a single space to put your towel,” said Gonçalo Narciso,
the hotel’s operations manager. He shook his head. “You can’t imagine.”
Amid the
sunscreen-smeared hullabaloo, the question arises: Is there an alternative
Algarve? A less-trod Algarve? An Algarve where a bit of serenity and the flavor
of the past have been preserved? In quest of such a place, I set off in late
May to travel beyond the universe of half-board arrangements and karaoke
nights. Carried by the region’s efficient EVA bus network, I traveled along
rocky coasts and sun-baked hills, pleasantly surprised to find fishing villages
and citadel towns where a more traditional Algarve still exists — and, in the
case of one tiny hamlet, Pedralva, is being reborn. From storybook medieval
castles to unmarked surfer beaches to mom-and-pop seafood joints, this
unspoiled Algarve, it turned out, is available to anyone with bus fare and an
urge to go against the flow.
Tavira
Following a
three-hour train journey from Lisbon to Faro, and a one-hour bus ride through
uninspiring back roads, I landed in Tavira, a coastal town near the Spanish
border with vestiges of ancient Phoenician and Roman settlements lurking under
its streets. Whitewashed buildings with wrought-iron balconies filled narrow
lanes, along with numerous Renaissance and Baroque churches — testaments to the
town’s wealth generated long ago from the fishing and salt trades. Even today,
the shallow, shimmering tidal pools of the salt pans do their quiet work just
outside the town.
On a stone bridge
spanning the Gilão River, which splits the town in two and flows into the
Atlantic, a three-piece band of guitar, accordion and tambourine played
spirited folk songs. More music spilled out from the tile-lined interior of the
Renaissance-era Church of Misericordia, where a bearded hipster schoolteacher
was strumming a guitar while leading boys and girls, dressed in pink smocks, in
a soaring hymn. Above, atop a hillside, the ruins of a medieval castle and the
clock tower of the 18th-century Santa Maria do Castelo church lorded over a sea
of orange-tile roofs.
The salt breeze
suffused the town with an agreeable torpor as I strolled toward Praça da
República, the town hall square, for a rendezvous with a resident. In the
middle of the riverbed, men toting plastic buckets yanked mussels from small,
rocky islands revealed by the low tide. A few German and French voices drifted
from sidewalk cafes, though hardly enough to drown out the locals’ mellifluous
Portuguese greetings of “Bom dia!” and “Tudo bem?”
“The essence of
eastern Algarve is its authenticity,” said Tim Robinson, a stocky, blond
Englishman as he welcomed me on the terrace of a cafe called Veneza. “This is
really where the old Portuguese way of life is being retained.”
Dressed in cargo
pants and a T-shirt, Mr. Robinson waxed poetic about the local architecture and
unfurled a tale that began with a brush with death and concluded with a
life-changing move to the eastern Algarve, where he has lived since 2008.
Several years ago,
Mr. Robinson recounted, he was living in London, where he ran a storage and
transportation business when he suffered a heart attack. Only 42 years old, he
conferred with his wife, a public relations executive, and they decided to flee
their high-pressure world and settle in Estiramantens, an eastern Algarve
village next to Tavira.
“For people who
are interested in the historic nature of the Algarve, this is probably the
crown jewel of historic cities,” he said, referring to Tavira. Today the couple
operate a 10-suite boutique hotel and restaurant, Fazenda Nova, on the grounds
of a formerly ruined 1836 farmhouse that they restored. Mr. Robinson fills his
days with tending to the hotel grounds — which include herb gardens, fruit
groves and 200-year-old olive trees that yield the restaurant’s own brand of
oil — and taking his family to offshore island beaches like Ilha de Tavira
(reached by a small ferry) and Praia do Barril (arrived at by a miniature
train).
“You don’t get
groups of guys coming here to celebrate a friend’s wedding, ” he said as the
breeze fluttered the cafe’s white umbrella above us.
Later, exploring
Tavira on foot, I found resurrected historic edifices scattered all over. The
town’s former covered market — a lovely wrought-iron structure from the 1880s —
bustled with boutiques and restaurants. Farther afield, some new white walls
and oddly angled metal surfaces had elevated a former jail into a modern town
library. Just around the corner, a renovation plan by the Portuguese architect
Eduardo Souto de Moura, who won the Pritzker Prize two years ago, was
transforming the Renaissance-era Convento das Bernardas into luxury apartments.
Entering the
majestic 16th-century Palácio da Galeria, I discovered the municipal museum.
This year’s big show, “Dieta Mediterrãnica,” runs into 2014 and is dedicated to
the foods of the Algarve. (Though the Algarve is not on the Mediterranean, the
show asserts that the region “is influenced by the Mediterranean climate.”)
Amid displays of
the Algarve’s cornucopia — baskets of dried carob, sacks of sea salt, bottles
of olive oil, tins of tuna, piles of figs — information stenciled on the walls
imparted intriguing facts (“Portugal is the third-largest consumer of fish in
the world, immediately after Japan and Iceland”). Suddenly, I was ravenous.
Fortunately, my visit coincided with Tavira’s annual two-week Festival de
Gastronomia do Mar, a homage to seafood. Many restaurants had assembled special
menus to showcase local tuna, mackerel, octopus, mussels, clams and other briny
bounty.
On the hilltop up
the street from the museum, a modern white restaurant called A Ver Tavira
served a lunch of plump scallops and shrimp on a bed of cucumber and
strawberries followed by baked mullet drizzled in olive oil. Dessert was an
unctuous fig parfait on a dark carob brownie.
By nightfall my
culinary explorations had taken me to the rustic Ponto de Encontro restaurant,
whose interior is lined with the region’s blue and white ceramic tiles. Tender
anchovy strips in vinaigrette received Christmas colors from diced red and
green peppers. A dessert of smoky carob ice cream sealed my reverence for
Algarve flavors.
Eager to bring home
those flavors, I ducked into Ex Libris Gourmet, a small boutique stuffed with
handsomely packaged sweet tomato jams, fig liquors, tinned sardines, smoked sea
salts, wines and olive oils — including a local brand called Monterosa that won
gold awards this year at the New York International Olive Oil Competition. “The
concept is food and design,” explained the owner, Tiago Centeno, who turned out
to be another refugee from the rat race. After 10 years in the Portuguese
military, he said, he and his wife moved to Tavira “because it’s more quiet and
peaceful” than other parts of the region.
“When most people
think of Algarve, they think of beaches and hotels, not history,” he continued,
pausing to show off chocolates filled with local olive oil. But Tavira, he went
on, “is not like the rest of Algarve.” One day I rented a bicycle and pedaled
down the riverbank past the tidal pools of the salt pans to Quatro Águas, a
finger of land pointing into the Atlantic. An old woman sold me a ticket for a
ferry that sputtered across a small channel and dropped me on Ilha da Tavira, a
long, slender island. A trail led between two rows of quiet outdoor bars before
emerging on an expanse of powder-perfect sand extending to the vanishing point
in both directions.
Scores of Polynesian-style
grass umbrellas poked up from the beach in orderly rows, giving shade to
nothing but scores of empty sunning beds. The lone employee of this mini-oasis
ambled over and explained that true high season wouldn’t begin for another
month.
“All the people
are in western Algarve right now,” he said. “The east, Tavira, is still very
little known.”
Praia da Rocha and Silves
I encountered
mainstream Algarve in Praia da Rocha, a sprawling beach resort in western
Algarve — the first spot in the region to be frequented by tourists. That was
more than a century ago. Today the cradle of Algarve holidaymaking represents
all of the triumphs and tragedies (mainly aesthetic) of the region’s rise from
provincial backwater to international getaway.
Triumph: the sublime
beauty of golden sands backed by jagged red cliffs. Tragedy: the stampede of
summer vacationers who pack its beach clubs and bars. Triumph: a 17th-century
fortress and century-old villas that dot the cliff-top streets. Tragedy:
generic condo developments and uninspired hotels. Triumph: fresh seafood,
everywhere. Tragedy: pints of Guinness, everywhere.
But even here one
can find remnants of an unspoiled Algarve. They lie beyond the gates of the
Bela Vista Hotel & Spa, the extravagantly restored century-old Moorish
mansion that claims to be the Algarve’s first hotel. Within I marveled at
black-and-white photographs of Praia da Rocha in the early 20th century. The
building’s exotic silhouette stands out starkly against a nearly empty
beachfront. Stepping out of that hushed prelapsarian era into the Technicolor
clamor of modern Praia da Rocha’s souvenir stands, cheap Chinese restaurants
and Irish bars was like experiencing the Fall of Man and expulsion from Eden —
touristically speaking.
A local bus
whisked me into the backcountry, past lemon trees and orange groves. After 20
minutes a hilltop fortress came into view, its red-stone battlements hovering
over a village that spilled down the hillside toward a river.
Winding my way up
the cobbled streets of the town, Silves (pronounced SIL-vish), I found Maria
Gonçalves, the chief municipal archaeologist, seated at a table in the castle’s
lushly planted grounds. A few couples roamed the ramparts, peering through the
crenelations as Ms. Gonçalves filled me in on the history of the town and the
structure, the largest and best-preserved castle in the Algarve.
“They were Arabs
from Yemen during the first half of the 11th century,” she said of the original
settlers and rulers, who arrived at the time of the Moorish occupation of
Andalusia, in neighboring Spain. Silves became the capital of Al-Gharb
Al-Andalus, as the Arabs called the region: the west of Andalusia (“al-Gharb,”
meaning “the West,” later became Algarve). The
city was known as a cultural hub.
“There were lots
of important poets from that period,” she said, most notably Al-Mutamid, who
also happened to be the governor of Silves (and later the king of Seville). “He
describes Silves as a town of indulgence. The palace. The ‘white gazelles’ —
the women. The banks of the river.”
Dynasties from
North Africa later seized the city, and Silves was eventually conquered by
Christian crusaders. But the Arab influence remains
omnipresent.
“There are around
3,000 Arabic words in Portuguese,” she said, including the names of numerous
Algarve towns: Aljezur, Albufeira, Alvor, Alfambras. Today Silves is twinned
with the Moroccan city of Marrakesh for cultural exchanges, but the ultimate
Moorish experience is the annual medieval fair, which takes place this year
from Aug. 2 to 11. Amid a recreated souk, hammam, mosque and other medieval
edifices, ersatz and real, thousands of locals and visitors in period outfits
consume food typical of the time, and cheer at elaborate re-enactments of
pivotal episodes in the Arab and later Portuguese history of Silves — including
the European crusaders’ bloody 15-day siege in 1189.
You can barely
hurl a fez, in fact, without hitting some Moorish homage in Silves. Ceramic
tiles with swirly Arabesque patterns form the facades of many of the two-story
buildings, and shops on Rua Elias Garcia display Moroccan hammered brass
lanterns.
Within a
16th-century house called Estudio Destra, one of many artists’ studios sprinkled
around town, shelves showed off ceramic plates, jars and tiles whose geometric
patterns and stylized animals, a brochure explained, were influenced partly by
Moorish motifs.
“The earliest and
best examples of European tiles are here in southern Portugal and Spain because
of the Moorish conquest,” explained the gallery’s owner, a British expatriate
named Roger Metcalfe, while carefully etching a ceramic vase.
I found the
genuine articles in the municipal museum, a modern building constructed around
a deep medieval cistern. Display cases showed off painted pottery — as well as
finely carved bone and delicate colored glass — that had been excavated from
this once-thriving Arab city.
“Send my regards
to/The beautiful places of Silves/And tell me if they miss me/As much as I miss
them,” read a poem by Al-Mutamid that had been painted (in Portuguese) on tiles
in the entryway to a town house nearby. He had composed the verses after moving
to Seville to rule as its king. But
Silves remained forever in his heart.
That night,
walking amid the discothèques and gaudy casino of Praia da Rocha, I was visited
by the same nostalgia.
Pedralva
The final push to
the western edge of the Algarve, Europe’s far southwestern corner, landed me
briefly in the port town of Lagos. Along its palm-lined marina, hawkers
approached with fliers for snorkeling adventures, whale-watching, sport
fishing, kite-surfing and sightseeing cruises.
But I was headed
to farther shores. Another bus continued westward over waves of brown hills
dotted with ruined stone houses and tiny lime-washed villages. In a village
called Vila do Bispo, a car from the nearby hamlet of Pedralva picked me up and
deposited me amid its stone-paved streets and restored white stone houses.
The village’s
existence is an Algarve miracle. Several years ago, Pedralva was on the brink
of ruin. The population had dwindled to nine residents, and many of the
19th-century houses were abandoned wrecks.
“It was a complete
ghost town,” said Antonio Ferreira, a former Lisbon advertising strategist who
effectively saved Pedralva by transforming it into one of the most original new
getaways in the Algarve.
After a health
scare several years ago, while still in his 30s, Mr. Ferreira quit his
high-pressure urban lifestyle to “get back to basics” in the Algarve. Rather
than settle in one of the myriad resort communities, Mr. Ferreira fell under
the spell of the 200-year-old backwater hamlet and, with some partners, spent
years buying and restoring the old stone residences. In 2010 they opened Aldeia
da Pedralva, an eco-tourism village replete with cobbled lanes, whitewashed
houses, a grocery store and a traditional Algarve restaurant. “The idea here is
to cut off from the life that you have in big cities, or even small cities:
cars, traffic, lots of information, lots of advertising, mobile phones,” he
said in the village’s reception area, where we sat drinking coffee. Outside the
window, in a quiet valley of pine and cork trees, no nightclub pounded, no
driving range beckoned. Occasionally a rooster crowed.
“We are the other
Algarve,” Mr. Ferreira said. “This is the unspoiled Algarve.”
Keen to see the
coast — the true end of the world, or at least the Continent — I hitched a ride
with a villager to Praia do Amado, a few miles away at the end of an unmarked
road.
Despite gray
clouds, a steady procession of barefoot young men and women in identical
head-to-toe black outfits marched across a crescent of soft sand bookended by
jagged cliffs. Large oblong objects were tucked under their arms, and determined
expressions sat stonily on their faces: surfers. Like some monastic order, they
strode into the tide to worship the wave. “Kelly Slater and Mick Fanning have
both come here,” said Filipe Costa, an instructor hanging around the booth of
the Amado Surf Camp, invoking two revered wave-riders. He added that, several
years ago, a more famous face had indulged in surf lessons here: Prince
William.
That night, after
lamb chops and local red wine in one of the two Pedralva restaurants, I retired
to my cottage with its timber ceiling and wood furnishings in funky colors. No
television, cellphone signal or Internet link distracted me from the silence
and the stars. The only sounds were those of owls and crickets in the
surrounding valley: the voices of the unspoiled Algarve.
IF YOU GO
TRANSPORTATION
EVA Transportes (351-289-899-700)
operates an extensive network of bus routes in the Algarve; fares generally run
from 3 to 10 euros, or about $3.75 to $12.50 at $1.25 to the euro. Routes and
schedules can be found on the English portion of its Web site, eva-bus.com/novo/index.php?lang=uk. To reach Silves, a local bus
run by Frota Azul(frotazul-algarve.pt) departs from Portimão, the
small city adjacent to Praia da Rocha. The trip takes around 30 minutes and
costs 3.25 euros. A regional train line also services the Algarve.
TAVIRA
Pousada de Tavira, Convento da Graça (Rua Dom Paio Peres Correia; pousadas.pt)
is a former convent that now features 36 rooms, a high-end restaurant and a
spa. Doubles from 136
euros. For budget travelers, Residenciais Lagoas (Rua
Almirante Cândido dos Reis 24; residenciallagoa.pai.pt) has small, cheerfully
decorated rooms (some with a curious Buddhist theme) in the town center
starting from 20 euros per night, depending on season.
Ponto de Encontro (Praça Doutor António
Padinha 39; 351-281-323-730; rest-pontoencontro.com) serves simple preparations
of sole, sea bass, sea bream, anchovies and other local fish — as well as
steaks — in a tile-lined dining room. A three-course meal for two, without
wine, costs around 50 euros. A more refined experience awaits at A Ver
Tavira (Calçada da Galeria 13; facebook.com/avertavira) atop the hill in Tavira’s
center. Options include razor clams with coriander and lemon juice, and duck
breast with fruit sauce. Expect to pay about 60 euros for a three-course meal
for two. Go to Ex Libris Gourmet (Rua 5 de Outubro 10; exlibrisgourmet.blogspot.fr) for olive oils, jams,
chocolates, wines, liqueurs, tinned fish and other delicacies.
PRAIA DA ROCHA
The 38-room Bela
Vista Hotel & Spa, (Avenida Tomás Cabreira; hotelbelavista.net) is housed in an
early-20th-century Moorish-style mansion overlooking the beach. One of the
Algarve’s top restaurants is on the premises. Standard doubles range from 125
to 240 euros, depending on season. No Solo Água (Marina de
Portimão; nosoloagua.com) has a swimming pool, a
restaurant, a bar and a beach club. A three-course meal for two people at the
restaurant, which serves everything from tuna tartare to tiramisù, runs about 60
euros.
SILVES
The hilltop town’s
main attractions are its medieval Moorish castle (Rua do
Castelo; 351-282-445-624; admission 2.50 euros) and museum, known as Museu
Municipal de Arqueologia (Rua da Porta de Loulé 14; 351-282-444-832;
admission 2 euros), which houses medieval Islamic artifacts. Estudio
Destra (Largo Dom Jerónimo Osório;estudiodestra.blogspot.fr) is the atelier of Roger
Metcalfe, a British expatriate ceramist.
PEDRALVA
Restored cobbled streets,
whitewashed houses, a grocery store and a Portuguese restaurant make up Aldeia
da Pedralva (351-282-639-432; www.aldeiadapedralva.com), which offers activities
like hiking, biking and bird-watching. A one-bedroom house costs 62 to 133
euros, depending on the month.
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