If you are looking for a home blessed with Algarve sun and sea, but without the tourist hordes that converge on much of the coast in summer, consider the town of Olhão.
This is not one of the Algarve’s famed seaside resorts. For its many admirers, that is part of its charm.
Olhão is a working town, with industry and commercial fishing. This injects a note of grittiness and a sense of Portuguese daily life that is muted now along parts of the Algarve shore.
True, the number of visitors to Olhão has climbed in recent years, but the town has a rounded personality and is bigger than its tourist trade.
The town’s heart is the waterfront food market, one of the best in southern Portugal. It is housed in two century-old red-brick market halls.
At one of the cafés that fringe the market, you can sit over a coffee and pastel de nata watching the occasional boat glide through the waters.
Geographically, Olhão is closer to the Moroccan city of Tangier than it is to Lisbon, the Portuguese capital. The pace is southern, relaxed.
One admirer is memoir author Valerie Poore, a Briton who lives in the Netherlands. She told me: “I first discovered Olhão in 2016 during a short winter holiday in the Algarve.
“Despite being wet and grey on the day of my visit, I was instantly attracted to the town’s mixture of faded elegance and traditional charm, combined as it was with a working fishing harbor.
“Subsequent visits in the following years cemented my conviction that of all the Algarve’s beautiful locations, Olhão was my place.
“I loved it for its character, warmth, and lack of pretension, as well as its uniquely lovely environs.”
She enjoyed wandering the coastal salt pans at sunset and taking ferries to the nearby islands of Armona and Culatra in the Ria Formosa, a lagoon system rich in wildlife, including flamingos.
“Leaving the waterside, my partner and I were constantly drawn to the back streets, where we watched children playing in the squares, old men sitting gossiping, and women chatting while they hung out their washing.
“For me, Olhão had it all, but it was in the myriad alleys, narrow, winding streets, and busy harbor that I felt its heart and soul.”
I also heard praise from another Briton, Kevin Gould from Manchester, England, a journalist turned restaurant owner who has made Olhão his home.
Speaking of the town, he too had recourse to the word “soul.”
I talked to Gould in Chá Chá Chá, his restaurant in the center of Olhão, tucked away in one of the myriad alleys admired by Poore.
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Four years ago, Gould wrote an article about Olhão, published by The Guardian under the headline “The real Algarve: ‘A white-washed village adrift in the kissing sea.’”
I told Gould I had read his piece as a love song to Olhão. Was he still in love?
“Oh, I definitely am. Olhão is a town with a great soul; it’s a working town, the biggest port in the Algarve.
“It’s not yet fallen prey to the vicissitudes of mass tourism…Your average tourist doesn’t come here because they say there is no beach.
“They don’t know that just a short ferry ride away and a stroll across the dunes there are two of the best beaches in Europe, on Armona and Culatra.
“And so the fact one has to work a little bit for one’s pleasures here dissuades quite a lot of people from coming, which is great.
“Equally, we have luxuries that money can’t buy here. We have fresh air, we have fresh food, and we have a distinct and virile local culture.
“So these are the things you can’t invent, and it doesn’t matter where else you are or how much money you have; you can’t always get these things.
“So as a consequence, our great joy in living here and working here at Chá Chá Chá is to visit the market first thing in the morning, where we buy exceptionally fresh, locally caught fish at reasonable prices.”
Gould said his conversations with the fishermen started around midnight to discuss who was going out to sea.
“We won’t look at fish that hasn’t been caught that morning… So the lovely thing about being here is one becomes more attuned to, in tune with, the weather, the tides, the seasons, the local emotions.”
If you love the sea and the lure of islands a short ferry ride away, Olhão could be just the place for you.
It suits those who want to live in a town that isn’t too big while also profiting from a more substantial settlement, the Algarve capital, Faro, right next door.
The population of Olhão town is about 28,000, that of the broader municipality about 45,000.
Local restauranteur Gould says of the culture, “Here, to be successful does not mean to be rich. Successful means to spend enough time with one’s family, to have time for one’s friends and neighbors, and not to work too hard…
“It is a very horizontal society. It’s not hierarchical, and everybody is expected to treat everybody else as their equal and not their better.”
Portugal is a good place to practice patience because the bureaucracy often moves with mind-bending slowness. In my experience, it can take literally years for the bureaucrats to register a change in property ownership, for example. If patience is not your bag, Portugal is best avoided.
Sincerely,
Stephen Powell
Contributor, Portugal Letter
