The quiet end of the Algarve

Vila Nova de Cacela is the Algarve most people drive past — which is exactly its charm. One long street, a market hall, a bakery that sells out of pastéis by ten, and the railway halt where the regional train clatters through to Faro. No strip of bars, no tour buses. The town works for its own people first, and you live alongside them for a week.

The covered municipal market on Largo do Mercado sells fish, fruit and vegetables in the mornings, and on the third Sunday of each month the Parque de Feiras hosts one of the biggest monthly markets in the region (08:00–14:00) — go early. The best coffee is at the café by the church square (ask for a mediana). For dinner, locals drive to the lagoon end of Fábrica and eat oysters at plastic tables while the tide goes out. Cacela Velha, five minutes away, is the postcard: a whitewashed clifftop hamlet above the Ria Formosa that somehow never got built up.