Lagos

I arrived in Lagos on a Tuesday afternoon with the windows down and the smell of salt air coming in off the Bensafrim river, and I remember thinking that the town looked too good to be real — terracotta rooftops stacked above whitewashed walls, an old town gate still standing at the edge of the waterfront, fishing boats tied up below. Most Portuguese coast towns have traded their fishing boats for tourist ferries, but Lagos still moves between the two, and that tension keeps it honest.

The old quarter rewards the kind of walking that has no destination. The streets within the old walls — the Rua Marreiros Neto, the steep lanes climbing toward the castle — are narrow enough that you’re always in shade or always in sun, nothing in between. The Igreja de Santo António sits in a square where pigeons congregate and old men read newspapers, and its interior is covered floor-to-ceiling in gilded baroque woodwork so excessive it becomes hypnotic. I went in for five minutes and stayed for forty. Outside, the Mercado Municipal runs along the waterfront in a converted 19th-century building, and the morning vendors — the figs piled in shallow wooden crates, the slabs of dry-cured sausage, the rounds of Alentejo cheese — operate with the quiet efficiency of people who have been setting up this way since before tourism existed. I bought figs and cheese and ate them by the stone fountain. A cat watched me without much interest.

What Lagos has that most Algarve towns have surrendered is actual street life that belongs to actual residents. There are good restaurants here where the grilled fish comes on plain white plates and costs nine euros and tastes better than it has any right to. There are bars in the old town where you can drink fino — chilled draught wine — at a counter while the evening crowd builds outside. And there are the cliffs: Praia Dona Ana is a fifteen-minute walk from the old gate, and the formation of ochre and terracotta rock around the beach is so baroque in its arches and turrets that the first time you see it feels like an illusion. You can rent a kayak from the beach and paddle through sea caves where the light comes down in shafts from holes in the ceiling. I did this alone at eight in the morning before the tourist boats arrived, and the silence in those caves, broken only by the water slapping the walls, was the kind of silence that makes you understand why people become monks.

When to go: May through mid-June hits the sweet spot — warm enough for the water, empty enough that you can get a table without a plan. September is the other window: the crowds thin fast after August, the light turns amber by four in the afternoon, and the sea is at its warmest from two months of summer sun.