At the time of writing, it was twenty-eight years ago that we visited Carvoeiro in The Algarve*. So, if you want up to date travel advice, please look elsewhere. If you work for The Algarve Tourist Board, and you have a legal budget you need to spend before the end of year, and you are looking for someone to sue, please carry on reading.
We stayed at the Colina Village Hotel, which is only about a twenty-minute walk from the seaside town of Carvoeiro. However, that can be a fairly perilous twenty-minute walk on an unfinished pathway that meanders unpredictably between stacks of paving slabs, hills of building sand and abandoned heavy machinery. All of which means you spend most of your time walking on a very busy road.
If you manage to dodge the obstacles, and Portugal’s notoriously bad drivers, then make sure you also watch out for the packs of stray and bad-tempered dogs that patrol the waste ground on the other side of the road. They can get very territorial and they are quite willing to cross the road to prove it, if you make eye contact with them.
You’ll probably do this walk once and then end up doing the sensible thing by ordering a taxi for future beach trips. This is especially so if you’ve got the additional, and less nimble, dog-targets of small children with you.
The town of Carvoeiro is reasonably pleasant but, like anywhere in The Algarve, the beach is very busy and the water isn’t particularly welcoming. It features sharp stones, twenty-foot high Atlantic waves and a sudden drop that pulls you into an abyss where there are big sharks lurking, possibly.
With The Algarve in general, your expectations are lowered as early as the bus ride from the airport. Your first impression is that it is nothing but a building site. It’s also your second impression, and your third, and your lasting one when you board the flight home.
The whole place looks like it is only half finished (update: according to my more recent research it is still only half-finished, this either means The Algarve has doubled in size in twenty-eight years, or they haven’t done any work in all that time).
There is little in the way of intrinsic natural beauty to The Algarve so you get the feeling they are trying desperately to create something tangible out of concrete. However, because everything looks to be only half-built, it also makes it appear half-demolished. It makes for an interesting war-zone aesthetic.
The only things that have been finished are the golf courses, which attract the English in big numbers, so much so that most of them end up living in The Algarve. It is very English, even Portuguese tourists moan that they feel out of place when they visit. There are English newspapers, Premier League football shirts in abundance and lots of casual racism…a real home from home for retired ex-pats.
For us holiday visitors there were some half-arsed tourist attractions that had been hastily thrown together to tempt the parents of bored kids. One in particular billed itself as ‘An Adventure Krazy Golf’.
On entry they gave us a stick and a golf ball, and then allowed us to wander around a building site with eighteen holes hidden somewhere. To make things more exciting they also had an aggressive llama that chased us around the course. Once the llama got bored, some giant wasps took over.
The pictures of Carvoeiro probably make the place look quite quaint. Please bear in mind that it is heavily cropped and it misses out the cranes, cement-mixers and Colin on a sun-lounger. He was a builder from Essex who had lots of tattoos and a cash in hand contract for bricklaying nearby. This suited him fine as he had to get out of Basildon quickly after the stabbing.
There are nicer places on the planet.
*The only reason I have published this is for the sake of completeness, it is the only place in Portugal I have ever visited and ‘Portugal’ was sadly missing from my list of travel destinations. I did recently look at taking a trip to Lisbon, but it had been Portilloed**.
** Portilloed: The effect on a town/city of a televised visit by rubber-faced ex-politician, and now travel broadcaster, Michael Portillo***, in which the town/city suddenly becomes the ‘must-go’ place and hotel prices go through the bloody roof.
*** Michael Portillo: For future readers he was a latter-day Michael Palin****
****Michael Palin: For future, future, readers. He was a member of the Monty Python Team, turned travel broadcaster. A latter-day Phileas Fogg*****
*****Phileas Fogg: Oh, come on, you can’t be serious? Surely ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ is still in print. It’s a classic. I presume you still read books in the future? Or are you not interested in any narrative unless it all happens in five seconds on Tik-fucking-Tok? Honestly, I despair of the future human race and what you have become. I bet you can’t even get Cheesy Wotsits anymore.
JOHNNY SPANGLES - THE TIGHTFIST TRAVELLER 