Road tripping through the magical European holiday destination that hasn't been ruined by overtourism

Day one

Despite weeks of scaremongering from the press, social media and my dad, there are no queues at border control at Faro Airport. We — me and my university friend Annabel — sail through smugly. Our smiles, however, are short lived. The crowds have simply migrated to the car-hire desk, where we subsequently gather dust and burn through the majority of our substantial snack haul for more than an hour.

The journey to Casas da Quinta de Cima — a roughly 40-minute drive east, towards the Spanish border — is more straightforward. We arrive in the evening's soft gloam. Our senses are muffled by darkness and the gentle patter on cobblestones of the rain that we’ve thoughtfully brought with us, but we can smell what we think is jasmine.

We snatch glimpses of the hotel as we’re escorted to our room, one of nine former whitewashed worker’s cottages (below). It is simply and thoughtfully furnished with a terracotta brick floor, traditional cane and plaster ceiling and a mixture of contemporary and antique pieces of furniture. The bathroom — with its tongue and groove pocket doors, freestanding bath and ginormous walk-in shower, big enough for a party of five — is a masterpiece. It is so overwhelmingly calm that our eyelids start to droop during a dinner of delicious room service steak sandwiches.

Day two

Quinta de Cima is a working lemon, orange and avocado farm that’s been handed down through five generations of the same family. When they are grown next to one another, lemons and oranges, we learn, smell like jasmine. We walk past the leafy rows on our way to breakfast, which is served in one of the cathedral-like agricultural warehouses, its doors nearly always open to the cobbled courtyard beyond. In the middle, the spindly legs of an antique table groan beneath the weight of hams, cheese and yoghurts, fresh juice and thinly sliced fruit and bowls of homemade granola so good that we try to squirrel away handfuls of it in our jean pockets.

This region, the Algarve, is synonymous with golf resorts with false delusions of grandeur, but there is so, so much more to it, if only I can tempt you to leave the soulless confines of your gated hotel or, better yet, stay in one of the boutique offerings like Quinta de Cima that are popping up in pleasing numbers. They have a real sense of place.

There are far-reaching stretches of sand and surfing, Moorish architecture and moreish food. And salt. Some of the finest in the world, in fact. We roll from breakfast to Salmarin, whose salt flats are nestled into Sapal de Castro Marim Nature Reserve, the oldest nature reserve in the country and a vital habitat for black-winged stilts, common ringed plovers, white storks and more.

Good salt, says Salmarin’s founder Jorge Raiado, is at the mercy of nature and takes time. He demonstrates how to best use it to bring out the flavour of different foods by pairing it with tomatoes (expected) and strawberries (unexpected).

Under João III (1502–57), numerous new pans sprung up throughout the Algarve and towns such as Castro Marim — the fortress of which looms over Raiado’s land — and Tavira became rich and lively export hubs, trading salt to northern Europe. In the latter, we scale the ruins of a medieval castle the innards of which are now a very pretty garden and feast on creamy fig-cream from a kiosk next to the slow-flowing Gilão River.

In the later afternoon, the hotel reveals that it has arranged massages for us, in a bijou space next to the surprisingly spacious gym. Like everything here, it’s perfectly formed, unpretentious and, did I mention, calm. A life here, I surmise, would be one entirely devoid of problems.

Day three

The hotel has bussed in two elderly women and a man from a nearby village to teach us how to weave with local dwarf palms. I am determined, but not particularly good. Annabel is no better. I don’t speak Portuguese, but I understand the gentle jokes the women make about working faster than the men.

And so to Alentejo, Portugal’s vast central region renowned for its white wine. The drive is mostly on single-lane roads that gouge a winding line through narrow valleys. Occasionally, the view broadens to fields of spectacular wildflowers (it is mid April). Our precise destination is Quinta do Paral, a 210-acre wine estate. Its owner is Dieter Morszeck, who sold a majority stake in his Rimowa luggage brand to LVMH for €640 million. He has a 10-seater PC-12 Pilatus plane, in which he sometimes ferries guests on day trips to Morocco or Spain.

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The difference between the two hotels is stark. Quinta de Cima is soft, Paral is sleek; de Cima feels like a hidden secret, protected from the outside world by densely planted fruit groves; Paral is very much open to it with expansive views over gently undulating vineyards. Some of their vines are ‘old’, or ‘ancient’, the not-very-technical term given to ageing plants that produce rich and complex wines due to their deep root systems and low yields. Inside the impressive winemaking facilities we spot six-or-seven-foot-tall replica clay vessels, or talha, in which grapes can be fermented. Used for more than 8,000 years and precursors to today’s stainless steel and oak barrels, they’re currently enjoying something of a renaissance.

In a rare fit of maturity I decide to unpack — and in every bag I find an orange or lemon, each one the size of two adult fists, that Annabel has stolen from Quinta de Cima. There will be no vitamin c deficiencies to speak of on this trip.

Day four

Day four passes at a languid pace. Breakfast in Portugal is a revelation. A proper meal, encompassing sweet and savoury. Here, it is served outside and there’s no menu. Instead, small dishes of everything — scrambled eggs, soft cheeses, meats, fruit — arrive in quick succession. Imagine an all you can eat buffet that you don’t even have to stand up for.

Several hours slip through our fingers lounging by the swimming pool and then it’s time to surreptitiously sneak into some of the other rooms. My favourite is one with a barrel roof and French doors that open out onto a communal courtyard. A walk-in wardrobe cleverly bisects the living bit from the bed.

Clemmie, a friend who (helpfully) lives in Portugal and (very helpfully) works for Lightfoot who has organised this very trip, arrives as dusk starts to gather at the edges of the sky. A chorus of frogs serenades her in. They live in the pond (above) in front of our room, one side of which has been sunken into the landscape so as to blur the boundary between lawn and water and stop wildlife from drowning. I’m thrilled that Clemmie can help me get through Annabel’s fruit stash.

We have dinner at The Wine Restaurant which spills out onto a still-fragile, but promising-looking herb garden. Wine pairing is practically de rigueur.

Day five

The three of us, plus the remaining citrus fruit, pile into the car for the one hour drive to Comporta, Portugal’s answer to The Hamptons. The road is studded with cavernous potholes, a not-very-welcome reminder of home, caused by recent, heavy flooding. On the way, there is a turning to Santiago do Cacém, the site of an ancient town mentioned by Pliny the Elder and Ptolemy. I make a mental note to come back to visit the Roman ruins.

I’ve never seen a stork before, but Comporta is full of them — nesting in massive, messy nests, balanced precariously on top of telephone poles, church steeples and chimneys (above). I’m the designated driver, but it’s hard not to crane my neck to catch a glimpse of them. Their smooth, gliding flight, peachy bills and monochrome plumage is captivating.

In recent years, this once-quiet, windswept stretch of Portugal has been co-opted by glamorous travellers who think bohemia is more of a trend than a lifestyle. It’s hard, however, to blame them. The village — a compact cluster of cafés and boutiques — still hasn’t burst its seams. Fishermen potter in the estuary and horses graze the dunes. Pine forests give way to rice paddies give way to beaches, each one wider than the last and all bashed, relentlessly, by wild Atlantic waves.

At dinner, at Sublime Comporta — a 168-acre resort shaded by cork trees — I cannot help but wonder which trusting member of staff has decided to sit me, a journalist, at a table next to Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie (Eugenie, 12th-in-line to the throne lives, part-time, nearby). I try to eavesdrop because I am not perfect, but am distracted by the best cheeseboard I have ever had. Portuguese cheese is, like its breakfast, a standout. Apparently, it's famous for its variety, which is news to me — and to my waistline. At even the most humble restaurants, including the one with paper tablecloths and school chairs that we sampled on our second night in the Algarve, meals start with something called couvert. Bread, local butter and regional cheeses and, if you’re lucky, olives and pâté. My favourites are the soft sheep cheeses.

Sublime’s rooms are scattered among the trees in cabin-style buildings. It’s like glamping for grown-ups, but with a supersize gym, phenomenal spa (a friend who stayed here cried tears of joy during her treatment) and a dramatic vaulted library-cum-bar. It’s set the standard for hotels in the area which are opening at lightning speed. Ando Living, Sublime Sand and Na Praia opened this year; two more are planned for 2027; a Six Senses for 2028.

Day six

It’s a wrench to drag myself out of what might be Portugal’s comfiest bed, but drag myself out of it I do, because me, Clemmie and Annabel have a ferry to catch. It crosses the protected Sado Estuary and deposits us in Setúbal, an hour away from Lisbon. We enter the capital via the futuristic-looking Vasco da Gama Bridge and head straight to Palácio Príncipe Real, one of Portugal’s most talked-about hotels.

The crumbling remains of a once proud pad — owned by the Teixeira da Mota family who hosted what sound like rip-roaring parties — were rescued by Gail and Miles Curley in 2014. The couple were lured in by its large-by-Lisbon-standards garden (what else, they’re British). It’s big enough that they’ve erected a swimming pool in it, around which a selection of yellow rubber ducks — gifted to them by staying guests — stand sentry. The Curleys are duck obsessed in the best kind of way. The hotel’s signature motif is an Indian runner duck and there are duck-shaped door knobs and ornaments, and duck-feet table legs. The couple make their own organic, extra-virgin olive oil, which is used generously at every available opportunity. The bottles are all stamped with a picture of an Indian runner duck.

We stumble uphill to Príncipe Real Garden, famed for its Mexican cypress tree which was planted in around 1869 (above). Its sweeping, horizontal canopy is now so large that it requires an internal iron and wooden framework to hold it up. In 1940, it was the very first tree in Lisbon to be listed as a Tree of Public Interest.

Day seven

While tumbling down Lisbon’s steep streets, on a private walking tour organised by Clemmie, we learn that Lisbon’s aristocratic families appropriated the lengths of pavement outside their houses and employed craftspeople to lay brick and stone in increasingly-elaborate patterns. And about the city’s Shops with History programme, an initiative to protect traditional and culturally significant shopfronts, which are identified by copper signs. There’s Sant’Anna, the city’s oldest ceramic factory, which took part in the rebuilding of Lisbon after 1755’s devastating earthquake by supplying tiled façades for new buildings and is therefore an indelible part of the Lisbon landscape you see today, and Caza das Vellas Loreto, which opened one month after the storming of the Bastille, making it one of the oldest candlemakers in the world.

We linger only briefly in Rossio — which sits directly on top of the buried ruins of a Roman hippodrome — because our affable guide is scarred by a previous client who insisted on dragging him around the square’s mega-Zara, the second-largest Zara store in the world, for four hours.

We spend longer, and rightly so, at the Church of St. Dominic (above). This is where Jesuit missionary Gabriel Malagrida was executed and where, in 1506, thousands of Jews were massacred by a Christian mob. Nature had its own way with it: the church was damaged by the 1531 earthquake and almost completely destroyed in the 18th-century one. In 1959, a fire killed two firefighters and took more than six hours to extinguish. The ceiling has since been rebuilt, painted in grotesque shades of pink and orange that are meant to be reminiscent of the flames, supported by still charred and sagging columns.

In Portugal, there is history hiding around every corner, and underneath every pavement. And variety — enough to rival any of Europe’s more established holiday destinations but without, so far, quite the same eye-watering prices or sense of having been overrun. Perhaps its most appealing quality is the sheer number of independent, family-run and boutique hotels, shops and restaurants. I’m already plotting my return — northwards, through the Douro, to Porto. You never know, Annabel’s stash of fruit might just run out by then.

Lightfoot Travel can organise seven-night, bespoke road trips through Portugal from £3,700 per person. The price is based on two people travelling together and includes: two nights at Casas Quinta de Cima, two nights at Quinta do Paral, one night at Sublime Comporta and two nights at Palacio Principe Real on a bed and breakfast basis. Plus, flights from the UK, a hire car and select meals, experiences and excursions.

Visit the Lightfoot Travel website for more information.