VICARIOUS | Discovered: The Algarve Awaits

Discovered

The Algarve Awaits

Forgotten Treasures of the Iberian Peninsula

Story and Photography | Dan Heyman

For me, Portugal has always been a little bit of a “forgotten” country. Maybe it’s where it resides; hanging on to the edge of Spain like some needy little brother, it’s a Western European country that even through all my travels, I had never had the chance of visiting.

Of course, those impressions are mine and mine alone; after all, here’s a country whose strong naval history lead to the discovery of Brazil, which still calls Portuguese its offcial language. It also just so happens to be the fifth most populous country in the world, with a populace some 200 million larger than that of Portugal itself.

After a few days spent in Portugal’s gorgeous Algarve region, however, I immediately found myself asking in my naiveté: why did so many leave?

Occupying the entirety of Portugal’s south coast, the Algarve is interesting in that it’s both a coast-loving, white sand, blue water vacationers’ dream as well as a nicely agrarian region, with rows and rows of orange groves. And barbeque. Lots of it. Oh, and desserts—more on that in a bit.

If you want to go to the complete opposite end of the “activity” spectrum, however, the region is fairly mountainous, meaning a spidery selection of great driving roads, a few of which lead to a FIA-spec race track that has hosted everything from Formula 1 test days to the Superbike World Championship.

Seems the Algarve has a little something for everyone, then.

We’d be tackling all of this at the wheel of the allnew BMW 3 Series, a car that’s tailor-made to make mincemeat out of those bends and whisk you back home afterward. Our journey starts, however, with a bus ride from Lisbon’s Humberto Delgado Airport through to the dry yet agricultural Alentejo region just north of the Algarve.

As you may or may not know, “dry”, when it comes to an agricultural region, often means “wine”, and Alentejo has pockets where bright green vineyards stretch to the horizon and beyond, the green appearing all that much more vibrant against the golden earth surrounding them.

Our first stop had us at the Herdade dos Grous estate, with its selection of white wines (as opposed to port reds from up north) from grapes grown in the region with names like “Antao Vaz” and “Verdelho”.

Typically, I prefer reds to whites, but when you find yourself in warm Portugal surrounded by bright blue skies, a refreshing splash of Herdade dos Grous Branco is in order. As you do.

Our home base for our stay—the Vila Vita Parc—sits about an hour down the A22 Estrada Nacional from dos Grous, through more vineyards and more perfectly-imagined hamlets than you can count, with names straight out of an epic adventure tale—“São Bartolomeu des Messines”, and “Paderne”, and “Alcantarilha”, to name but a few.

We found the Vila Vita Parc to be exactly as we’d originally pictured it, and more. Yes, there are the all-white buildings with rust-coloured clay roofs you’d expect of a sun-baked region such as this, but you don’t set up a resort along one of the most beautiful coasts in Europe without going an extra mile or two.

I could go on and on about the meticulous grounds, multiple swimming pools, perfectly-manicured stone paths, the 20- foot fountain surrounded by talkative ducks; I could, but there’s one view of the Vila Vita Parc that sums it all up: it’s on the ocean-facing side of the resort, punctuated by a white—there’s lots of white here; if The Lord of the Rings’ Minas Tirith actually existed, it may look something like this— residence atop a stepped hill that may as well be part of a golf course, so perfectly manicured are the grounds. Words don’t do it justice, but it can be hard to believe that places like this actually exist.

Hard to believe food spreads like this exist, too.

In Canada, it seems most Portuguese restaurants and restaurant chains revolve around chicken. They have big shoes to fill; the chicken we sampled at the resort was prepared in such a way that one helping was nowhere near enough. One lunch featured a lightly battered breast with a hint of citrus, and you’ve never experienced a chimichurri sauce quite like this; tart, with just enough kick to make sure you know it’s there. I could’ve eaten it all day if I didn’t have to leave room for dessert.

There was a chocolate dish—like barbeque, there’s lots of that here—but try as it might with its presentation, it wasn’t the highlight. No, that honour goes to a much more proletarian pastry, known as a pastel de nata and loosely translated to “custard tart”. May not sound like much, but they are buttery, eggy and oh-so-sweet and even for a custard hater like myself, I couldn’t get enough. They’re everywhere, too; on the Av. Da Liberdade, in the middle of downtown Lisbon, we came across a bakery that seemed to exist solely to sell these things, for 1 Euro a pop.

Thing is, we didn’t want to overdo the desserts because we had some driving to do, and when you’ve got roads like this and a car like this, not to mention a racetrack, to conquer, well, there’s precious little time for bathroom breaks, y’know?

For 2019, the 3 Series is all new; the base 330i xDrive model is lighter than previous but also makes more power: 255 horsepower and 295 lb-ft of torque, up 7 and 37, respectively, on last year’s car. It’s fed to all four wheels through an eight-speed auto with responsive paddles.

The mountain roads that start not 20 minutes from Vila Vita have the car flowing beneath you, the chunky wheel in your hands deftly communicating your intentions to the wheels below. It may be one of the tamer-looking cars in the segment, but the latest 3 remains a master at conquering roads like this. Every curve, slow or fast, can be taken with gumption because even after spending just a few minutes at the wheel, the 330i inspires confidence.

This was all before the track, too. The Autodrómo Internacional do Algarve may be located only about an hour’s drive away from the coast and paradise, but it’s no slouch. There are blind curves and a healthy mix of heavy braking zones into hairpins, made all that much heavier by the fact you’re often braking while heading down a steep bank.

Want proof? Try it for yourself, as the track offers driving experiences ranging from rides with professional drivers to the ability to run your own car, for a fee. Just don’t tell the rental agency. It’s a circuit that demands more than the “pedestrian” 330i, so we were set loose in pre-production versions of the 2020 M340i, all 382 hp and 369 lb-ft of it. We were given the full track to work with, escorted by instructors that were there to ensure you weren’t going too fast; I was worried they’d keep us too tightly reigned in, but let’s just say they were very good at making sure we didn’t catch them.

The M340i models we sampled had a set of adaptive dampers and if I was impressed with the 330i’s handling before, these brought it to another level.

The M340i is a car that rarely catches you off guard in its response to your inputs; I can recall maybe twice where it didn’t do precisely what I thought it would and believe me when I say that when it comes to track stuff, you almost always remember what went wrong.

Not here, though. With dampers set to Sport Plus, you know exactly what’s going on beneath your butt, where the car’s going to go and what you’ll need input-wise for that next corner. Then, when you’re through all that, you got that extra power to play with. However—and I’m not sure if this is to the 330i’s credit or the M340i’s detriment—but I wouldn’t say that all 127 of those extra horsepowers and all 74 of those extra torques could be fully felt.

To really make a comparison we’d need to drive the M340i on the same great roads we’d run earlier that day, or the 330i on the track.

Here’s the thing, though.

As I stood at the archway over my balcony at the Vila Vista and watched the whitewashed southern Portuguese sunset against a violet sky, I realized that as great as that track experience was, a good drive on the open road can equal it in thrills, but thrills of a different type. The white-walled towns, the orange groves, the barbeques you could see burning across the landscape, the vineyards, those great, serpentine mountain roads; that’s what I wanted more of, and what any visit to Portugal should include.