Vila Vita Parc Resort & Spa

Vila Vita Parc opened in 1992 and has spent three decades as the benchmark against which other Algarve hotels are measured. The Michelin Guide gave it three Keys, its highest award, making it one of only two hotels in Portugal to hold them.

It occupies 54 acres of clifftop at Alporchinhos, near Porches, and the scale is the first thing to understand. There are ten restaurants, six bars, a golf course, a private beach club, a Sisley spa that was the first in Portugal, and 203 rooms, suites and villas spread through gardens above the sea. This is a resort, and a large one.

What keeps it from feeling generic is the detail. The buildings are whitewashed and low, arranged as a series of courtyards rather than a block. Rooms have parquet floors, blue and white decoration, and hand-painted pottery made in Porches, the village a few minutes inland that has produced it for decades. Every room has a private terrace looking at either the Atlantic or the flower gardens. The clifftop villas run over several levels with their own infinity pools.

Food is the strongest argument. Ocean, under the Austrian-trained chef Hans Neuner, has held two Michelin stars since not long after it opened in 2007, and each year the kitchen takes a new theme while working with Atlantic ingredients. Below it sit nine other kitchens covering everything from Portuguese to Asian to a beach grill, which at a property this size is a genuine advantage over hotels where you eat the same menu twice.

The estate also runs its own farm and winery in the Alentejo, supplying the restaurants.

Be clear about what this is not. If you want thirteen rooms and the owner greeting you at the door, that is Vila Joya twenty minutes down the coast. This is the opposite proposition, executed about as well as the format allows.