About
A guide is only worth reading if you know what the person writing it stood to gain. So here is all of it, in order, including the parts that do not flatter us.
Boutique Portugal is a guide to the small and design-led hotels of Portugal: quintas, palaces, converted convents, montes, townhouses and guesthouses, from Lisbon and Porto to the Douro, the Alentejo, Madeira and the Azores.
One person, not a team, which is worth knowing when you decide how much weight to give it.
How hotels are chosen
There is no formula, but there are things I look for.
A building or a setting with something specific about it — architecture, a history, a landscape, a family who have been there for generations. Design that was decided rather than defaulted into. Independent ownership, or a small group. And the question that matters most: is there anything to say about this place that could not be said about a hundred others?
Most of the hotels here have fewer than sixty rooms. Some have considerably more, and they are included because the building or the setting earns it — Reid’s Palace in Funchal, Vila Vita Parc in the Algarve, the pousada in a former government ministry on Praça do Comércio. A few are run by international groups, where the property is the reason rather than the flag over the door.
Official star ratings are recorded and decide nothing. Several of the best small hotels in the country are classified as four-star, guesthouse, Turismo de Habitação or Casa de Campo, and the classification system is not measuring what this site is interested in.
Researched, and first-hand
This is the limitation to understand before trusting anything here.
Most profiles are researched. They are written from published sources, the hotels’ own material, and patterns across large numbers of guest reports. They are written in the third person, and every one of them states on the page that the hotel has not been visited.
Roughly one hotel a month is visited properly: stayed in, photographed, filmed. Those pages carry the visit mark, original photography, a first-person account and the video. There is no mistaking one for the other, and that is deliberate.
The balance shifts over time. It shifts slowly.
How the site is funded
At the moment, it isn’t. The booking links on this site currently earn nothing.
The intention is to join Booking.com’s affiliate programme. When that happens, those links will earn a small commission on completed stays, the price you pay will be identical either way, and this page will be updated to say so on the day it changes.
Hosting and the domain cost around seventy dollars a year, which I pay.
What does not happen here
No hotel pays to be included, and no hotel can pay to change what a page says. Hotels are not told they are being written about until after the profile is published — the first they usually hear from me is an email with a link to their own page.
Where a stay has been provided by a hotel, the page says so, beside the review.
Photography
Where a hotel supplied the images, they are credited. Where the photographs are mine, they are marked as mine. I do not publish images I do not have permission to use.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, tell me and I will fix it.
press@boutiqueportugal.com