Travelling To Portugal - 7 Days In The Algarve

Last updated on 29 December 2024

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Guys…I’m totally back. Back in the UK, back in my own bed, back on my laptop, back to the freezing cold winter that just keeps on going…So, it’s mostly good. I hope you guys have a had a fantastic week – I know I have! – and that you enjoyed having Erin, Sarah, Elisabeth, Chrissy, Bekka and Brooklyn on the blog! Weren’t they awesome?!

When I first put all the photos from my camera onto my computer, there were 1006 photos. That may seem like a lot, but for me, it’s not really. I managed to cull it down to just over 600 in the first delete session, and then a little over 500 in the second. Because I want to share the photos and my adventures with you guys, but don’t want to put you through the pain of looking at all 500 odd photos, I’ve decided to pick the main ones from each day and create a couple of posts to go through them and let you in on what happened and what we did each day while we were in Portugal. Sound okay? Let’s do this thing!

Day One // Monday

We got up on Monday at stupid-o’clock and drove to Bristol, where we parked the car and got onto the plane around mid morning. It was about 1pm when we got into Faro airport, and it was around 2pm when the shuttle driver dropped us off at our hotel. We stayed at the Luna Alpinus Hotel, in Falesia, which is down on the bottom coast of Portugal. Here’s a map:

The ‘A’ is where the Hotel was, and Faro is circled. Here’s our Hotel:

After a delicious lunch, we wandered down to the beach. The cliffs on the beach are this amazing red colour, and have all these grooves in them. The sign in this following photo is a sign to Albufeira, which is the nearest town to Falesia beach, which we went to a couple of times.

Amazing colours right!? For the rest of the day we hung around the hotel, unpacking our things into the apartment suite we had that was bigger than our house here in England…but, having said that, that’s actually not saying much.

Day Two // Tuesday

Tuesday morning we looked at the local shops and found one called the Hippie Chic. Over the week, this become our favourite shop and we must have gone there about 6 or 7 times in total. They had really cool things – amazing dresses and scarves, jewellery (of which I bought a lot), note books, musical instruments – and it was all a reasonable price too. I think the lady was glad to see us gone by the time we left.

On Tuesday afternoon, we took the shuttle into Albufeira, and spent the afternoon walking through alley ways and looking at market stalls. It was a really cool town. the shuttle dropped us off at the top of a look out across the town, so we could see all the buildings and the beach.

To get down to the town, I was dreading walking down a billion steps, knowing that we would have to come back up them. But boy was I surprised when we got to the top of the ‘stairs’ to discover that there were two sets of elevators there! What?! I know! They had two escalators (obviously one up, one down), then a flat platform for a few metres, then another lot. Amazing! And crazy…but I was glad I didn’t have to walk! Lazy bum, right here.

Albufeira is circled in red, and ‘A’ is where our hotel was.

Being right on the beach, there were wide spaces for sitting, walking, a company hiring out segways for half hour slots, lots of food and drink places, and all the buildings built on the hills were all on different layers, with all their roofs and verandas at every level possible. There were heaps of little stalls, with a variety of different things being sold.

One of our favourite stalls was run by a Brazilian man, who made all his own jewellery from natural things. So he had necklaces, bracelets, earrings etc all made of things like seeds, bark, coconut husk (see second photo down on the left). It was really amazing!

In every town we went to, also, they had pottery shops. They love their pottery and their tiles, so Mum bought a couple of little bowls and a really pretty wall tile. When we were packing to leave at the end of the week, we realised we had a tonne more kgs we could have filled in our luggage Mum was bummed that she didn’t buy more bowls. But they are really beautifully made and really pretty patterns and amazing colours.

Day Three // Wednesday

On Wednesday we decided to go back to Albuferia. We only really saw about half of the main centre and wanted to keep exploring. My dad and my little sister went down to the beach and splashed around, while my mum and my other sister wandered through the shops again, finding ones we hadn’t seen the day before. We also went and got coffee and cake at a little place that was super cheap, and so yum it was insane (see top row photos).

Also, Cliff Richard kept popping up everywhere! There was a sign near the Hippie Chic in Falesia where he was with his guitar, and then we found find selling wine in Albufeira! What!? Obviously not the real Cliff Richards, but a cardboard cut out of him. He must have gone to the area years ago (he looks quite young) and they’ve been using him for advertising ever since. Quite amusing really!

The photos just above are of a sculpture in the middle of a round-a-bout, and then some pretty buildings, the last of which is a museum of some sort. We followed the alley ways through the town and found some really cool things and little places that we probably wouldn’t have if we had just stuck to the main centre part. So it was pretty fun to go exploring.

Just realised I managed to get that photo there (second from bottom on left) in two sets of photos. Sorry about that. I love that picture with the chair though – it seems someone else hates those plastic chairs too! I don’t blame them. Top right picture is my sister with Al Capone. They had an ice cream parlour that had a bunch of wax figures in it. So they had Al there, and Elvis and Marilyn Monroe and probably others inside that I didn’t see.

So there’s Monday to Wednesday! I would show you Thursday too, but that was a huge day, with lots of different places; we took a small tour of the southern province of Portugal (Algarve), so that was the majority of the pictures I took. I’ll show you those tomorrow! You’ll have to come back and see them!!

Hopefully that wasn’t too long for you! Thanks for reading/looking; I hope you’re enjoying my holiday updates!