Alte
"Alte is the Algarve before the Algarve became the Algarve — and it is still here, still itself."
There’s a sign as you approach Alte on the N124 that announces it as the “Aldeia Mais Típica do Algarve” — the most typical village of the Algarve — and I was prepared to be disappointed by that kind of billing, which usually means a place that has become a pantomime of itself. Instead I found a village of about a thousand people that has somehow held onto exactly the things that designation promises without becoming a theme park: the white walls and blue trim on the windows and doors that you see in all the postcards, but applied to houses where people actually live, with geraniums in the window boxes and satellite dishes on the roofs and laundry on the lines.
The Fonte Grande — the main spring — is what gives Alte its particular character. The water comes up cold and clear from the limestone beneath, filling a stone pool surrounded by plane trees, and in spring and early summer the flow is strong enough that you can hear it from the street above. Old women fill plastic containers from the tap at the side. Children wade in the shallows. An older man was fishing in the deeper part of the pool the afternoon I visited, which I found deeply optimistic. The water is clear enough that you can count the pebbles on the bottom from a meter away. I took my shoes off and sat with my feet in it and the cold was a shock after the heat of the drive inland.
The village lanes reward the kind of walking where you’re not trying to get anywhere. The Igreja Nossa Senhora do Assunção has a Manueline portal — the same exuberant maritime Gothic carving style you find in Lisbon, surprising to encounter in a village this size — and the interior has azulejo tile panels depicting the life of St. John the Baptist in the cool blue-and-white of 18th-century Portuguese tilework. A bakery near the church square sells amêijoas — almond cakes shaped like shells — and the honey from the local beekeepers who work the cistus and rosemary on the hillsides. I bought both and ate them in the square, and the combination of something sweet and nutty with the smell of the flowering trees was the most completely pleasant five minutes I spent in Portugal.
The hills around Alte are good for walking: the Rota Vicentina passes nearby, and there are short circular routes through the almond orchards and along the dry riverbeds that come alive in winter. In February the almond blossom turns the entire hillside white, and the contrast with the blue winter sky and the red earth is the kind of thing that makes you understand why this region was worth fighting over for a thousand years.
When to go: February for the almond blossom — the most beautiful thing the Algarve interior produces. Spring into June is ideal for walking and the spring is running full. Avoid midsummer middays when the inland heat is serious; come for a morning or evening instead.