Luxury Hotels Atlas / Places / Portugal / Almancil / Vila Valverde Design Country Hotel
Vila Valverde Design Country Hotel
Almancil, Portugal · Valverde · Near Luxury
Luís Tavares spent years courting the farming family who owned a ruined nineteenth-century manor above the bay at Praia da Luz, then sketched the hotel he wanted over lunch with his friend the architect Mário Martins. It opened in 2004 with fifteen rooms averaging 62 square metres, large enough that the tourism authority told him to stop applying for four stars and go for five. Solar panels now cover around 70 percent of the electricity, the vegetables come from the garden, the pools hold no chlorine, and nobody under ten is admitted.
- 15 rooms
- Opened 2004
- Rooms from 312 sq ft (29 m²)
- Architect: Mário Martins
- Interiors: Nini Andrade Silva
About Vila Valverde Design Country Hotel
- It bills itself as the only five-star rural hotel in the Algarve, and when the count was published it was one of just six five-star rural hotels in all of Portugal.
- In some rooms the wall between the bathroom and the bedroom is glass, so you can lie in the bath and look out at the Atlantic.
- The owner arrived in the Algarve in 1985 and co-founded an incoming agency for the German-speaking market that became one of the biggest travel companies in Portugal before he ever built a hotel.
- Nini Andrade Silva was hired to redesign every interior in the house for roughly half a million euros, part of a habit of reworking the hotel about every two years.
- The five hectares still carry the old quinta's orange and olive trees, along with a kitchen garden, fig, lemon and peach trees, a water mine and a carp pond.
History
Luís Tavares was not from the Algarve. He moved south in 1985 with his German wife Margit, and two years later co-founded an incoming travel agency aimed at the German-speaking market that grew into one of the largest in Portugal. After years of selling other people's hotels he wanted a small one of his own, and he found the site on the edge of Praia da Luz: five hectares of old farmland that had gone out of use, with a ruined nineteenth-century manor on it, orange and olive groves around it and a view down over the bay. It took him years of patient negotiation with the farming family who owned the quinta before they sold.
The architect was a friend, Mário Martins, who works out of Lagos. Over lunch Martins pushed him to write down what he actually wanted and sketched alongside him as he talked, then asked at the end whether that was it. It was. Martins drew the conversion between 2003 and 2004, keeping the manor's character while opening the plan out with slate, steel, wood and glass and a lot of daylight. Rooms came out at an average of 62 square metres, about the size of a generous one-bedroom flat, and that scale changed the plan: Tavares had intended a four-star hotel, and the Direcção-Geral de Turismo told him the suites already met the five-star requirements and he should apply for those instead.
Vila Valverde opened in 2004 with fifteen rooms and suites and has stayed in the family since. Tavares refurbishes roughly every two years on principle, and for one of those rounds brought in the interior designer Nini Andrade Silva to redo the whole hotel for about half a million euros. Sustainability was part of the brief from the start rather than a retrofit: solar generation covering around 70 percent of the hotel's electricity, its own water mine, a kitchen garden and fruit trees, chlorine-free pools whose surplus water goes to irrigation, and the Green Key award for several years running. It takes thirty guests at most, and children under ten are not accepted.
The setting
Praia da Luz is a small resort village a few kilometres west of Lagos, on the stretch of the western Algarve where the coast begins to turn wilder and the cliffs get serious. The hotel is not on the seafront: it sits inland on the Estrada de Valverde, on the outskirts of the village, on five hectares of mature trees, orange groves, lawns and an organic market garden, with its own spring, a small pond with carp in it, and the Bay of Praia da Luz in the distance below. The Rocha Negra, the black basalt headland that closes the eastern end of Luz beach, is the landmark you see from the village. Lagos, with its old walled centre and the Ponta da Piedade rock formations, is a short drive east; Sagres and Cabo de São Vicente, the southwestern corner of Europe, are about forty minutes west.
Restaurants and bars
- Alecrim restaurant — Restaurant · Contemporary cuisine inspired by regional Algarve tradition
Experiences
- Hiking trails, cycling paths, horseback riding — Discover the Algarve region's hiking trails, cycling paths and horseback riding.
- Beaches of the region — Starting point for some of the most beautiful beaches in the region.
Amenities
- Rituals amenities
- Spacious balconies
- Organic vegetable garden
- Gardens and leisure areas
Open Vila Valverde Design Country Hotel in the atlas for live weekend rates, photos, and the full folio.
More hotels in Almancil
- Dona Filipa Hotel — Independent · Accessible Luxury
- Dunas Douradas Beach Club — Independent · Accessible Luxury
- Ria Park Hotel & Spa — Independent · Accessible Luxury
- Vale do Lobo Golf & Beach Resort — Independent · Accessible Luxury
- Hotel Quinta do Lago — Independent · High Luxury
- Conrad Algarve — Conrad · Grand Luxury