The bat signal was raised at around 20:00 local time.
The oscillating fans in our tiny studio apartment are humming with a pleasant hum, and the last scraps of dinner were still on the kitchen table. Olives, peanut butter sandwiches, and the last sips of an ice-cold five-ounce serving Superbock beer, a local favorite. Outside, the first sepia rays of the evening sun cast long shadows across the desert landscape. A cold wind settled in the air.
Jamie, my partner, looked up from her computer at this scene and smiled.
“Okay,” she said, regretting it. “Let’s go.”
we were technically working from the inside of this tiny basement studio apartment in the microscopic beach town of Vila do Bispo—but we were really practicing the time-honored tradition of surfing to hit it off. A wallet-sized wireless router and these oscillating fans (no A/C) were as close as we’d get to home for the next week. For these few glorious days, our life belonged to nature.
Like each of us cared. It was the golden hour in Portugal and we were facing uncertainty.
Within seconds, our little black rental car was squeezing through the narrow streets of Vila do Bispo and roaring off into the great unknown. A rolling hill greeted us, then a stone icon, then a one-lane road. Then, all of a sudden, we were the only car in sight, drifting toward one of a thousand cliffs that protected one of a thousand perfect beaches in the southwest corner of this tiny seaside country. A single power line and a clump of palm trees in the distance indicated our destination.
First, however, we reached a final traffic circle, where we found a royal blue sign with a vertical arrow and a LOT surprising message.
breast.
I surveyed the nothingness around us and asked a question that would soon seem very silly.
“Are you sure?”
Palmares is located just a stone’s throw from the resort town of Lagos.
GOLF
***
The Portuguese have built an iron-clad reputation as essentially the friendliest people in the world, and it doesn’t take long to see why.
The land is rugged and wild, consisting almost exclusively of dramatic cliffs, golden sand and icy blue water. The food (and wine) is fresh, acidic and green. The weather is uniformly warm and dry. Most exercise, many surf.
It should come as no surprise to learn that golf developed as a natural result of these living conditions, but for many American golfers, it is.
Half a century ago, the inhabitants of the ancestral homeland of golf in the British Isles realized that Portugal and its sandy soil (and therefore its perfectly manicured sandy terrain) were ideal for golf courses. They’ve kept the secret ever since, enjoying affordable dress times and expertly groomed grounds and 300 days of sunshine.
Once upon a time, surfers brought word of the biblical biblical waves to America, sparking a tourism boom that helped finance the country’s development. Now, a similar phenomenon is spreading among golfers. New courses are popping up along the coastline. An American carrier (United) has even started flying direct from Newark to Faro, the closest airport to the big golf crowd on Portugal’s southern coast, called the Algarve.
Little did Jamie and I realize that we would spend our 10 days in Portugal learning about golf. We planned to see just two courses, starting closer to Faro at one of the sleekest (and most beautiful) resorts in the country, Quinta do Lagoand ending up on the coast at Palmares, where a 27-hole Robert Trent Jones cow has a Michelin-starred restaurant (In the south) in the club.
We quickly realized that just two locations would not do. Like much else in Portugal, golf was built for exploration.
At Quinta, where three 18-hole courses are still some of Portugal’s best golfing offerings, the taste is fierce. The Quinta bills itself as a “wellness resort,” and vacationers work out on the sports fields and blow off steam in a handful of world-class training facilities. However, the golf is the star of the show. Larranjal’s course splits its fairway with a fragrant orange grove, but even on a balmy summer afternoon, the breeze was blowing 20 mph and the greens were as powerful as enchantedthe Portuguese spirit. Along the way, the South and North courses remain in the Portuguese Open, two glorious walks through rolling hills with razor-sharp bunkering and careful conditions.
In many ways, the three Quinta courses share DNA with their peninsular siblings in Spain, visually comparable to courses like Valderrama and El Camiral. Quinta do Lago and El Camiral, a future host of the Ryder Cup outside of Barcelona, ​​both are owned by the Irish billionaire Dennis O’Brien.
But not all of Portugal shares Quinta’s vision. Further west, Palmares adopts a more rugged, natural golf look to the landscape, with softer edges and more blurred lines. And further north, it’s hard to play any golf without getting a recommendation for a psychedelic, fizzy youngster Dunes of Komporta. David McClay Kidd’s first design in Portugal has earned whispers as the best new course in all of continental Europe. (“It’s worth giving up anything to do,” said Sam Billings, another adventurer.) Dunas is set in a popular beach destination (Comporta) an hour outside of Lisbon, ideal for American golfers and off the beaten path … as long as you can spare some time. A maintenance issue left the old course closed during my visit.
Fortunately, I wasn’t left without trying golf in a proper Portuguese surfing destination. HAD Saint Anthonynear Sagres, a wild shot of golf in the rolling hills, and West Cliffs Coursenear the famous northern surfing town of Peniche. For $75 on weekdays, you can get an audience with one of Alice Dye’s prized one-of-a-kind designs while enjoying ocean views that would be just as at home on Pebble Beach.
Among all destinations and in all ways, the unifying theory of Portuguese golf was accessibility. We could play anywhere, and reasonably enough, and be very glad we did. We could play too EVERYWHERE: A royal-blue sign indicating a course close arrived at what felt like every intersection and every freeway sign.
Of course, not all destinations are created equal. Conditioning in the desert remains a challenge—it’s very easy to “lose a course” in a place with so little rain, Francesco Murdolo, Palmares’ self-styled director of golf, informed me. But for places with a tight grip on maintenance, golf was exciting, lively and relaxed.
In the end, the country left us free to pursue the furthest whims of our sense of adventure – whether it be a dream destination or a golf course outside a traffic circle in the middle of nowhere. This, more than any other feature, puts Portugal squarely at the center of my affections.
travel – good travel – is about loss.
And in the developed world, there can be no better place to lose yourself than Portugal.
;)
