Pergola Guest House

In 1925 a Cascais businessman named Marcelino Correia bought two chalets standing side by side with a French-style garden between them, had them done up, and gave one to each of his two daughters. The family kept them for sixty years. In 1985 one of the chalets opened as a guesthouse, the first tourist accommodation in a town that now has a great deal of it.

The facade is the thing people stop for. It is covered in hand-painted antique tiles, and the garden in front of it flowers most of the year, which makes it one of the most photographed houses in Cascais. Inside there is a white marble staircase, an iron balustrade, stone floors laid in geometric patterns and bas-relief stucco ceilings, all original.

The interiors have been refreshed more recently than the exterior suggests. Where the house was once furnished heavily with antiques, Arraiolos rugs and oil paintings, the current look is lighter: white walls, mid-century furniture, soft lighting, a single accent wall or headboard in a strong Portuguese pattern. The old features have been kept and the clutter removed, which is the right call.

There are fifteen rooms, all doubles, looking either over the street or into the garden. The garden itself, tended by one of the original daughters for decades, remains the best thing about the property. Breakfast is served on the covered terrace or in the dining room by the fireplace, with Cascais biscuits, and a glass of port is put out in the evenings.

There is no pool and no spa. There is a restaurant in the garden.

The location is central Cascais, on Avenida Valbom among the shops, and about a hundred metres from the railway station. That is worth spelling out: the train runs along the coast into Lisbon in roughly thirty minutes, so you can stay by the sea and do the city as day trips. The old town and the Praça 5 de Outubro are five minutes' walk, the fortress ten, and Boca do Inferno about twenty-five.