Luxury Hotels Atlas / Places / Portugal / Albufeira / Wine & Books by the Sea
Wine & Books by the Sea
Albufeira, Portugal · Independent · Near Luxury
The VidaMar resort at Salgados shut for two months at the start of 2026 and reopened on 1 March as something else: Wine & Books by the Sea, a 12 million euro reinvention by the PBH group built around Portuguese wine, Portuguese cooking and Portuguese writing. Two bookcases the height of the room stand in reception, a deliberate nod to Livraria Lello up in Porto. Joana Saraiva did the interiors in dune sand and palm green, and named the spa The Library: Stories, Pleasure and Aroma. There are 250 rooms, six pools indoors and out, and the Salgados nature reserve wrapped around the whole thing.
- 250 rooms
- Opened 2013
About Wine & Books by the Sea
- Lagoa dos Salgados, the fifty-hectare lagoon behind the dunes, has logged more than 200 bird species and is the only site in the Algarve where greater flamingos have ever attempted to breed.
- Guia, the village the hotel is addressed in, was formally designated Portugal's capital of piri-piri chicken by the government in 1999, thirty-five years after Ramires started grilling it there.
- It dwarfs the two originals. Wine & Books in Lisbon and Porto are small city hotels; this one runs to 250 rooms in six categories, four outdoor pools and two indoor.
- The rebrand was staged around the calendar: bedrooms redone from October 2025, then a full closure through January and February 2026 for the public rooms, then guests on 1 March.
History
This building opened in 2013 as the VidaMar Algarve Resort, on the dune line at Praia dos Salgados west of Albufeira. It belonged to the Portuguese group PBH, which in 2025 decided to stop running it as a generic beach resort and hand it to the house brand it had been building in the cities instead. Wine & Books had already worked in Lisbon and in Porto as small hotels organised around Portuguese literature, Portuguese wine and Portuguese food. The Algarve would get the first one at resort scale.
The conversion cost 12 million euros and ran in phases. Bedrooms were reworked from October 2025; the resort then closed through January and February 2026 while the public rooms were rebuilt; it took its first guests in soft opening on 1 March 2026 and brought services up gradually through the month. Joana Saraiva, an architect and a board member of PBH, led the design, working in soft tones drawn from the dunes and muted greens taken from the palms, the lagoon and the golf course next door. The signature move is the pair of floor-to-ceiling bookcases in reception, which the hotel's own staff compare to Livraria Lello in Porto, alongside warm wood and traditionally made furniture. The spa is called The Library, for Stories, Pleasure and Aroma.
What carried over is the scale: 250 rooms across six categories, including connecting pool-view rooms for families, four outdoor pools, two indoor, a gym, a kids' club and event space. Carlos Saraiva, who chairs PBH, describes the brand as an ambassador for Portuguese culture. The commercial director has put it more bluntly, saying the resort is trying to move away from the word luxury and closer to the idea of lifestyle.
The setting
The address is Rua da Boca da Alagoa in Guia, a village in the Albufeira municipality that most of Portugal knows for one thing: chicken. Ramires opened here in 1964 grilling chicken marinated in piri-piri over charcoal, the recipe travelled, and in 1999 the Portuguese government formally named Guia the capital of piri-piri chicken. Ramires is still on Rua 25 de Abril and still busy.
The hotel itself sits out at the coast, between the Herdade dos Salgados golf course and Praia dos Salgados, with the Reserva Natural dos Salgados wrapped around it. Lagoa dos Salgados, roughly fifty hectares of shallow reed-fringed water held behind an unbroken dune cordon and fed by the Espiche and Vale Rabelho streams, is one of the most serious birdwatching sites in the central Algarve: over 200 species recorded, greater flamingos, purple swamphens, black-winged stilts, Caspian terns and the ferruginous duck that is hard to find anywhere else in the region. A raised boardwalk runs the south bank from the Praia Grande car park. Albufeira old town is a short drive east, Armação de Pêra the same distance west.
Restaurants and bars
- Moby Dick Buffet Restaurant — Restaurant · buffet
- Primadonna Italian Restaurant — Restaurant · Italian
- Aji Asian Cuisine — Restaurant · Asian
- Coco's Restaurant — Restaurant
- Balcão da Tasca da Memória — Restaurant
Experiences
- The Library S.P.A — Themed 'Stories, Pleasure and Aroma', with a heated indoor pool.
Amenities
- On-site parking
- Room Service 24h
- Private transfers from Faro Airport or other Algarve locations on request
- Parking available on site
- Pet-friendly
Open Wine & Books by the Sea in the atlas for live weekend rates, photos, and the full folio.
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