The bat signal went up around 8:00 PM local time.
The oscillating fans in our small studio apartment rattled with a pleasant hum, and the last bits of food were still on the kitchen table. Olives, peanut butter sandwiches, and the last sips of an ice-cold five-ounce portion Superbuck beer, a local favorite. Outside, the first sepia rays of the evening sun cast long shadows on the desert landscape. There was a cool breeze in the air.
Jamie, my partner, looked up at this scene from her computer and grinned.
“Okay,” she said relentingly. “Let’s go.”
We were technical we were working from the inside of this tiny basement studio apartment in the microscopic beach town of Vila do Bispo – but we were really into the time-honored surfing tradition of messing around. A wallet-sized wireless router and these oscillating fans (no air conditioning) were as close as we were going to get home for the next week. For these glorious few days, our lives belonged to the wild.
Like we both cared. It was a golden hour in Portugal and we were looking for uncertainty.
Within seconds our little black rental car squeezed through the narrow streets of Vila do Bispo and roared into the great unknown. A rolling ridge greeted us, then a stone icon, then a one-lane road. Then, very suddenly, we were the only car in sight, driving towards one of the thousand cliffs that protected one of the thousand perfect beaches in the southwestern corner of this tiny seafaring country. A special power line and a bushel of palm trees in the distance indicated our destination.
But first we came to a final roundabout, where we found a royal blue sign with a perpendicular arrow and a terribly surprising message.
Golf.
I surveyed the nothingness around us and asked a question that would soon sound very foolish.
“Are you sure?”
GOLF
***
The Portuguese have built a rock-solid reputation for being essentially the friendliest people in the world, and it doesn’t take long to realize why.
The country is rugged and wild and consists almost exclusively of dramatic cliffs, golden sand and ice-cold blue water. The food (and wine) is fresh, sour and green. The weather is uniformly warm and dry. Most sports, lots of surfing.
It should come as no surprise to learn that golf developed as a natural outgrowth of these living conditions, but for many American golf travelers it has.
Half a century ago, residents of golf’s ancestral homelands in the British Isles realized that Portugal and its sandy soil (and by extension, its perfectly manicured sandy grass) were ideal for golf courses. They’ve been hiding the secret ever since and enjoy affordable tee times, expertly manicured grounds and 300 days of sunshine.
Surfers once brought the word of biblical Portuguese waves to America, sparking a tourism boon that helped finance the country’s development. Now a similar phenomenon is spreading among golfers. New jobs are emerging all along the coastline. One US airline (United) has even started flying direct from Newark to Faro, the airport closest to the abundance of great golf courses on Portugal’s southern coast and dubbed the ‘Algarve’.
Jamie and I didn’t know we would spend our 10 days in Portugal learning about golf. We planned to see just two courses, starting closest to Faro, in one of the country’s swankiest (and bougiest) resorts, Quinta do Lagoand ending all the way along the coast at Palmares, where a 27-hole Robert Trent Jones loop is home to a Michelin-starred restaurant (To the south) in the clubhouse.
We quickly realized that just two locations would not be enough. Like so many other places in Portugal, the gulf was built for exploration.
At Quinta, where three 18-hole courses are still among the best golf courses in Portugal, the taste is strict. Quinta calls itself a ‘wellness resort’, and holidaymakers work out on sports fields and let off steam at a handful of world-class fitness facilities. Yet golf is the star of the show. The Larranjal course shares its surface with a fragrant orange grove, but even on a calm summer afternoon the wind blew 20 miles per hour and the greens were as strong as charmedthe Portuguese spirit. On the other side, the South and North courses remain in Portuguese Open condition, two glorious walks through rolling hills with razor-sharp bunkering and careful conditioning.
In many ways, the three Quinta courses share DNA with their peninsular siblings in Spain, visually similar to courses like Valderrama and El Camiral. Quinta do Lago and El Camiral, a future Ryder Cup host outside Barcelona, are both owned by the Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien.
But not all of Portugal shares Quinta’s vision. Further west, Palmares endorses a more rugged, natural glimpse of golf in the landscape, with softer edges and blurrier lines. And further north, it’s hard to play golf without getting a recommendation for a psychedelic, sparkly new one Comporta Dunes. David McClay Kidd’s first design in Portugal is rumored to be the best new course in all of continental Europe. (“Worth dropping everything,” says Sam Billings, a fellow adventurer.) Dunas is tucked away in a popular beach destination (Comporta), an hour outside Lisbon, ideal for American golf goers and well off the beaten path… as long as you can get a tee time. Due to a maintenance issue, the year-old course was closed during my visit.
Luckily, I wasn’t left without experiencing waves at a real Portuguese surfing destination. There was Saint Anthonynear Sagres, a wild wave in the rolling hills, and the West Cliffs Coursenear the famous northern surfing town of Peniche. For $75 on weekdays, you can draw a crowd with one of Alice Dye’s only credited designs, while enjoying ocean views that would be equally 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 pretty reasonably, and we’d be pretty happy we did. We could play too everywhere: A royal blue sign indicating a nearby course arrived at what seemed like every intersection and highway 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-appointed golf director, told me. But for the places where maintenance was tightly controlled, the golf was exciting, lively and serene.
Ultimately, the country left us free to pursue the greatest whims of our sense of adventure – whether it was to a dream destination or to a golf course off a roundabout in the middle of nowhere. This, more than any other feature, makes Portugal the center of my affection.
Travel – Good traveling – is about getting lost.
And in the developed world, there is perhaps no better place to lose yourself than Portugal.
You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com.
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