Casa Modesta

The house belonged to the grandparents of Carlos Fernandes and his sister Vânia, who is an architect. What she did with it is the reason the property has been written about far beyond Portugal.

Rather than convert the old house into a hotel, the family kept its logic and extended it. The result is a long low wing of nine bedrooms, all doubles, each with its own private patio open to the sky and the lagoon beyond. The walls are white, but the materials against them are the ones this region has always built with: brick, cork, terracotta, lime. It reads as modernist and as vernacular at the same time, which is difficult to pull off and rare to see done this well.

Beyond the rooms there is a barrel-vaulted lounge, a rooftop terrace, an outdoor swimming pool, a solarium, a room for treatments and massage, and a garden with a section given over to vegetables grown organically for the kitchen.

The setting is the Ria Formosa Natural Park, a lagoon of tidal channels, salt pans and barrier islands running along the eastern Algarve coast. It is one of the most important wetlands in Europe for birds, and the water is shallow, warm and constantly changing with the tide.

What the house offers is access to how people actually live here. Guests can go out to see clams being gathered from the mud, watch bread baked, see fruit picked and dried, take a traditional boat out onto the lagoon, go birdwatching, or sit out at night under a sky with very little light in it.

Olhão and its covered fish market are a short drive, Faro airport around twenty minutes, and Tavira half an hour east.