Montebelo Vista Alegre Ílhavo Hotel

Vista Alegre has been making porcelain at Ílhavo for two hundred years, and what grew up around the factory was not just a works but a village: the founders' palace, a house for the master painter, a chapel, a theatre, and the Bairro Vista Alegre, rows of housing built for the people who worked there.

The hotel occupies most of it. The founders' palace forms one wing, joined to the master painter's house next door and to the old workers' quarter, which now holds modern rooms, studios and apartments. The original factory alongside is a museum of the company's history, and it is genuinely worth an afternoon: two centuries of Portuguese design, from royal dinner services to contemporary collaborations.

Porcelain is everywhere in the hotel, as it should be, down to the espresso cups in the rooms.

Accommodation ranges widely, which matters here more than usual. The simplest singles and doubles are in the master painter's palace; larger rooms and suites are in the founders' palace and its new wing; the Bairro rooms are modern, and there are studios and apartments among them. At 162 keys this is a large hotel by the standards of anything else on this site, and it runs with full-service systems: spa, pool, restaurant working with Centro region cooking.

The location is Ílhavo, on the estuary a few minutes from Aveiro, the canal town with its Art Nouveau buildings and moliceiro boats. Costa Nova, with its striped wooden fishermen's houses, is close, as are the beaches. Porto is around an hour by car.

Be clear about the trade. This is not a small independent, and the appeal is the setting, the history and the campus rather than intimacy.