Cooking and Nature Emotional Hotel

Alvados is a village in a limestone valley in the Serras de Aire e Candeeiros, an otherworldly stretch of central Portugal full of grottoes, sinkholes and enormous underground caves. Very few foreign visitors go there, which is odd given how close it is to things they do go to.

The hotel is a low building of concrete and glass set among olive groves that have been worked for centuries. There are twelve rooms and each one was designed around a single emotion, which sounds like a marketing device and turns out to have been taken seriously.

Magic has the look of a children's picture book: candy colours, a chequered floor, fairytale murals. Passion is lined with mirrors like a Parisian cabaret. Saudade, the untranslatable Portuguese word for a kind of longing, is done in a muted palette with lines of poetry painted directly onto the walls. The others run through Adventure, Happiness, Romance and the rest. All look out onto the valley.

The cooking half is equally literal. A chef takes you through local cheese and olive oil, then out into the garden with a glass of wine to pick what will become dinner, then into the kitchen to cook it. If you would rather not, the honesty bar is stocked with wild Portuguese botanicals to build a gin and tonic from while somebody else bakes the bread.

There are indoor and outdoor pools, massages and yoga by arrangement, free bicycles, and walking trails leaving from the door towards the Alvados caves.

The position is better than the address suggests. The monastery at Batalha is 17 kilometres away, Fátima 20, Alcobaça and the Convent of Christ at Tomar a little further, which puts three UNESCO World Heritage sites within easy reach. Nazaré and its winter waves are 35 minutes. Lisbon airport is around 70 minutes.