Sublime Comporta

Comporta is the part of Portugal that money found late and, so far, has mostly left alone. Rice paddies on one side, the Atlantic on the other, and between them a forest of umbrella pine and cork that runs down to the dunes. Sublime spreads across sixty-eight hectares of it, the buildings kept so low and so far apart that you rarely see your neighbour.

The estate began small, a project of nine bedrooms, and grew outward into the trees rather than upward. José Alberto Charrua drew the architecture; Miguel Câncio Martins, better known for the Buddha Bar and Man Ray in Paris, handled the interiors. The cabanas take their cue from the region's old fishing huts and rice barns, timber and pitched roofs, and inside they turn quiet and tactile: polished concrete, blue-and-white linen, driftwood, the sand of the dunes carried up to the terraces. Two wings, Terracotta and Sand, now run as one, and the feeling holds across both.

The name of the flagship kitchen, Sem Porta, means without a door, and the cooking works to the same idea: Portuguese, seasonal, close to the ground. Much of what reaches the plate comes from the estate's own garden, planted with more than three hundred herbs and vegetables, and the fish arrives from the coast a short drive west. Breakfast, taken under the pines, is the meal people tend to remember.

Around Sem Porta the estate has laid on a long roll of other rooms, an Italian table at Davvero, the beef house at Beefbar, a fire-led Food Circle, and the Beach Club down on the sand with the Atlantic doing the talking. It is a programme built for a week rather than a night, variety across the days, and we will not pretend the small hideaway of the early photographs is still the whole of it.

What Comporta sells, in the end, is space. The beaches at Pego and Carvalhal run long and near-empty even in August, and the walk out to them in the morning is the point of the address more than any single room. Horses are part of the picture too, riders on the sandbar where the estuary meets the sea, a habit of this coast long before the hotels arrived.

Back among the trees, the spa keeps the same low key, treatment rooms that open to the outside and a yoga pavilion ringed by pine, the products drawn from The Organic Pharmacy. Book a cabana away from the main pool, and the stillness that made the name still surfaces. The caveat is honest: this is a large resort now, and busy in season, so the quiet is something you have to go and find rather than something that finds you.