Carvoeiro

Carvoeiro’s beach is small enough that I could see both ends of it from a single spot on the sand — a tight crescent of gold wedged between orange cliffs, houses stacked up the slope behind it in tiers, balconies angled to catch the view. I’d come mainly as a base for a boat trip to the famous Benagil sea cave a few kilometers down the coast, but Carvoeiro itself turned out to be the better half of the day. It has the same honeycombed, wind-and-water-carved sandstone cliffs that make Benagil famous, just without quite the queue of tour boats circling for the perfect photo.

Algar Seco and the Quiet Version of Benagil

A short walk east of the village center is Algar Seco, a jumble of rock formations, natural arches, and a viewing platform built directly into the honeycombed cliff, where staircases descend to a small platform overlooking a collapsed sea cave open to the sky — locals sometimes call it the “boneca de pedra,” or stone doll, for a particular rock formation shaped like a hunched figure. I got there at eight in the morning before the tour groups, and had the whole strange, pockmarked landscape essentially to myself, waves working audibly in the caves below the platform. It’s the kind of geology that photos flatten out; standing there, feeling the spray and hearing the water move through rock chambers you can’t see into, is a different experience entirely.

I did eventually take the boat to Benagil, and the cave lives up to its reputation — a domed sea cavern with a circular opening in the roof letting sunlight fall onto a small beach accessible only by water — but the crowd of kayaks and small boats jockeying for a photo inside took some of the magic out of it. Back in Carvoeiro that evening, eating grilled squid on a terrace overlooking the cove, a waiter told me most of his own family had never bothered visiting Benagil at all. “We have our own caves,” he said, gesturing vaguely toward Algar Seco, with the shrug of someone who’d rather not fight a crowd for a view he already had at home.

When to go: Visit Algar Seco at sunrise before the tour groups arrive, and book any Benagil boat trip for the shoulder season (May or late September) when the water’s calm enough to enter the cave but the queue of boats is thinner.