Carvoeiro

I found Carvoeiro by accident, taking a wrong turn off the highway near Lagoa, and then I found myself driving back to it twice more before the week was out. The village sits at the bottom of a narrow valley that opens directly onto a small cove beach — Praia de Carvoeiro — which is enclosed so tightly by the golden sandstone cliffs that even in summer it keeps a quality of enclosure, of being a place that has limits and knows it. Fishing boats still work out of the cove in the early mornings, which gives the beach at six a.m. a different character than it has at noon: the boats go out, the fishermen sort the nets, the village smells of diesel and sea rather than sunscreen.

The village behind the beach is steep and whitewashed, climbing both flanks of the valley in a way that means almost every house has either a view of the sea or a view of the cliffs. The restaurants along the esplanade are tourist-facing in the honest sense — they want you to sit and watch the water — but the food is not aspirational or forgettable in the way of resort restaurants. I ate a plate of gambas grelhadas at a place with a blue awning, grilled prawns with garlic and lemon, a carafe of the house white, and it was the kind of meal that doesn’t resolve into any particular memory beyond being very good and completely right for the place and time. The best possible recommendation.

A twenty-minute walk east along the clifftop brings you to Algar Seco, where the rock formations become surreal: columns and buttresses of sandstone rising from tidal pools, natural arches leading to cave openings, the sea coming in through fissures in the floor. There’s a bar built into the cliffs here — genuinely built into the rock, using the natural formations as walls — and you can sit with a drink and watch the Atlantic push in and out through the caves below. The whole Carvoeiro stretch of coast east to the Slide and Splash waterpark is accessible via a series of timber boardwalks bolted to the cliffside, which is engineering of a specifically Portuguese kind: practical, slightly vertiginous, entirely without handrails in places, and deeply pleasurable.

When to go: May, June, and September are ideal — the beach is swimmable and the village is not overwhelmed. The cove gets busy in July and August but it fills up and then it’s full, rather than growing indefinitely the way larger beaches do. The cliffside walks are excellent year-round; the rock formations at Algar Seco are dramatic in winter storms.