Book Lagos tours & attraction tickets

Few stretches of European coastline have been photographed as relentlessly as the cliffs around Lagos, and the obsession is entirely justified. The town sits at the western edge of the Algarve, where the Atlantic begins to assert itself more forcefully than it does further east, and the geology responds in kind: ochre and rust-coloured limestone towers, sea arches worn through by centuries of swell, and grottos that glow with refracted light at the right hour. Ponta da Piedade, the headland that juts into the ocean just south of the old town, is the centrepiece of all this, and it draws visitors onto the water in every kind of vessel from open kayaks to catamarans.

The old town itself sits behind low Moorish-influenced walls and rewards an unhurried morning on foot. Lagos was a significant port during the Age of Discovery, the point from which Portuguese explorers departed for the African coast in the fifteenth century, and that history is legible in the architecture around Praça do Infante Dom Henrique, named for Henry the Navigator, who is closely associated with the town. The covered market building, the Igreja de Santa Maria, and the remnants of the old city walls all sit within easy walking distance of one another, giving the compact centre a density of historical reference that surprises first-time visitors who arrive expecting only beaches.