Algarve

The region changes as soon as you leave the coast road. To the north, the land rises into the Serra de Monchique, where the air smells of resin and wood smoke, chestnut trees line the lanes, and the hillsides are scattered with cork oaks stripped to rust-red trunks. Further inland, the hills soften into orchards and small farms, with whitewashed houses set back among orange trees. Along the southern shore the character shifts again. Cliffs of honey-coloured rock fall to coves that are reached by steep paths, and the sea has carved arches and caves into them. Towards the east the land flattens into salt pans, sandbars and the broad, tidal lagoon of the Ria Formosa, a place of reed beds, wading birds and low horizons. At the western tip, Sagres is bare and wind-scoured, where the land seems to give up and the Atlantic takes over.

The towns are close enough to each other that you can move between very different moods in a single day. Silves sits above the river Arade, its red sandstone castle walls rising from the town's rooftops, and its streets are quiet enough to hear a shutter going up in the morning. Lagos has old town walls and a fishing harbour where men mend nets on the quay and the grilled sardines are sold from a grill beside the water. Tavira is the most gracious of them, with its white and terracotta houses on either bank of the Gilão and an old bridge that people stop on to watch the current. Further east, Faro's old quarter has a cathedral and cobbled squares, and beyond it the lagoon opens out with its sandbanks and small boats. A day here is a sequence of small things: bread still warm from a bakery, the clatter of café chairs, the taste of salt on a breeze that has crossed the water, and the sudden hush of a lane that leads you out of town altogether.

What stays with you is the pull between the working landscape and the sea. The farms, the fishing boats and the salt pans are still in use, and the cliffs and lagoon shift with the tide in ways that no itinerary can fully control. Many visitors leave with the sense that they have only skimmed the surface, and that the region rewards a return. You find yourself thinking about the evening light on the stacks at Ponta da Piedade, the sound of the lagoon at dusk, and the thought that another week here would not be wasted. The Algarve is not one place but several, stitched together by roads and by the sea, and the wish to stay in it grows the more of it you see.