4 Days in Lagos: The Coast
of Golden Cliffs

Before the beaches, the town — and Lagos earns a morning on its own. Behind the marina the old centre is a knot of whitewashed lanes and small squares inside surviving stretches of wall, cooler and quieter than the coast, best walked early or in the dead of the afternoon. The Igreja de Santo António hides the surprise: a plain exterior opening onto a riot of gilded talha dourada, one of the most extravagant baroque interiors in the south, the Algarve's small answer to the gold churches of the north. The adjoining Museu Municipal keeps the town's archaeological odds and ends; down on the water the squat Forte da Ponta da Bandeira still guards the harbour mouth it was built to defend.

But Lagos was also, in the fifteenth century, the launch port of the Portuguese Age of Discovery — and the site, in 1444, of the first market in Europe for enslaved Africans. The Mercado de Escravos on the main square, now a small museum, marks it plainly, and the traveller who has admired the gold and the caravels owes the place the honesty of stepping inside. The same seafaring drive that gave Portugal its monuments gave it this, and Lagos, to its credit, no longer hides the second half of the story. It is a short visit, and a necessary one.

The reason to come is the rock. South of the town the coast breaks into the Ponta da Piedade, a headland of ochre sandstone the sea has carved into stacks, arches, tunnels and hidden coves, the most spectacular stretch of cliff in southern Europe and, at dawn, very nearly empty. The traveller works it on foot along the cliff-top path — bikeable, too, with a rental from the town — and down the long staircases to the small jewel beaches tucked beneath: Praia do Camilo, reached by its famous wooden steps, two scoops of sand divided by a rock tunnel; Praia Dona Ana, the picture-book cove; the long flat sweep of Meia Praia for the morning swim; Praia de Porto Mós further west for the quiet.

But the cliffs are best understood from the water, and the only honest way to see the grottoes is to go into them. A small boat or a kayak out of Lagos marina threads the arches and the sea-caves at the base of the Ponta da Piedade — the gold rock closing overhead, the green water lit from below, the whole thing impossible to photograph and unforgettable to be inside. Go on the first departure of the day, before the swell builds and the flotilla arrives. Further east lies the Benagil sea-cave, the famous domed cathedral of rock with its eye open to the sky, reachable by boat or kayak from along the coast — over-photographed, still astonishing, and best, again, early. The light, the emptiness, the cold green water: it all belongs to whoever sets an alarm.

There is one drive worth breaking the beach rhythm for. Twenty-odd kilometres west of Lagos, past the surf town of Sagres, the land narrows and the cliffs rise and then everything simply ends at Cabo de São Vicente — the south-western tip of mainland Europe, a bare headland of red rock sixty metres above the Atlantic, topped by a lighthouse whose beam is among the most powerful on the continent. The Romans thought it a sacred place where the world ended; the medieval mapmakers drew it as the edge of the known. Henry the Navigator kept his school of seamanship near here, and it was from this corner of the country that the caravels pushed out into an ocean nobody had charted.

To stand at the railing as the sun goes down into the Atlantic is to feel the geography of the whole trip in one place — the continent run out underfoot, the next land an ocean away, the wind hard and salt and endless. A man sells the self-proclaimed “last bratwurst before America” from a van in the car park, which is exactly the kind of cheerful, slightly absurd note the place needs to stay bearable. The sunset here is the best on a coast made of sunsets, and worth the late dinner it costs. The land runs out; the traveller stands at the end of it; and tomorrow the road turns inland, away from the sea at last.