I discovered the Alentejo by accident. I was driving from Lisbon to Evora and took a wrong turn somewhere near Montemor-o-Novo that added forty minutes to the journey but took me through three villages I had never heard of and down a dirt track past a lake where two flamingos were standing in the shallows. I arrived at my destination an hour late and immediately rearranged the rest of my trip to spend more time in the region.
The Alentejo is the cork and wine and wheat country of central Portugal, roughly the size of Switzerland, and it receives about three percent of the country’s visitors. The maths on that should interest any traveller who prefers to go where crowds do not.
Monsaraz: The Village on the Hill
Monsaraz sits inside medieval walls on a hilltop above the Alqueva reservoir, the largest artificial lake in Western Europe. The village has maybe forty permanent residents and a handful of restaurants, a church, and views across the lake and the Spanish border that go on for fifty kilometres in every direction.
Stay the night if you can. When the day visitors leave at five, the place becomes something else entirely: the sound of swallows, the smell of wild herbs, and a silence that is actually silent. The best wine in the region comes from the estates around the lake and costs almost nothing in the local shops.
Marvao: Higher and More Remote
Marvao is higher and harder to reach than Monsaraz and consequently emptier. It sits at 865 metres on a granite ridge right on the Spanish border, with a castle at the far end of the village that seems to grow out of the rock rather than having been built on it. On a clear day from the battlements you can see into three Portuguese districts and across into Spain.
The village below the castle is tiny and perfectly preserved. A couple of restaurants, a pousada converted from a convent, and the sound of the wind being the main form of local entertainment. Do not arrive expecting anything to be open after eight in the evening.
Evora: The Best Small City in Portugal
Evora is the capital of the Alentejo and one of the most complete historic cities in southern Europe. A Roman temple, an aqueduct still cutting through the streets, whitewashed lanes, and a medieval cathedral all exist inside a working city where people go about their actual lives around them.
Two nights minimum. One for the city itself, one for the surrounding landscape. Hire a bike in the morning and cycle out into the cork oak forest and olive groves that surround the walls. The megalithic monuments in the countryside around Evora, ancient standing stones older than Stonehenge, are almost completely unmarked and visited by almost nobody.
The Alentejo Table
The food here is built around the black pork from free-ranging Iberian pigs that eat fallen acorns in the cork forests. Acorn-fed pork loin, migas (a thick bread and herb dish), caldo verde soup, and a cured sausage called paio that is worth buying to take home. The olive oil is extraordinary and cheap. The red wines from the Alqueva area regularly beat French and Italian wines of three times the price in blind tastings.
The best eating is in the small towns rather than the tourist villages. Find a place where the menu is handwritten on a chalkboard and nobody speaks English. Point at things. The food will be better.
