Discovering Albufeira by Motorhome: Complete Guide

So, Albufeira. We have to tell you about it, because it’s THE town everyone brings up the moment we say we live in the Algarve. We’ve been several times, to film some livestreams and mostly to bring over friends who come to discover the region, and every single time we leave with the same mixed feeling, torn between the charm and the concrete.

Our visit to Albufeira, live

Before we give you our considered opinion, here’s the walk exactly as we lived it, camera in hand, a livestream shot through the alleys one autumn morning (you’ll see, the atmosphere is already in full swing by 10am).

Albufeira, the Algarve’s little corner of Britain

There’s a little game we love to play at Faro airport, we watch which plane has just landed, especially the ones from the UK, and we see a whole crowd of youngsters pile off and head straight for the bus, destination party. And there’s a real river of them : right now there are around 29 flights a week between Faro and Manchester alone, and roughly 20 more from Birmingham, so a British holidaymaker can swap the drizzle of the North West for the Algarve sun in under three hours.

Honestly, it makes sense, and it runs far deeper than cheap Ryanair seats. Portugal and England are the oldest allies in the world, bound by the Treaty of Windsor signed in 1386 (building on an earlier pact of 1373), and the two nations have never once gone to war against each other since. So when a Brit lands in the Algarve, they’re not really strangers, they’re stepping onto the soil of a 600-year friendship, and Albufeira is where that friendship throws its biggest party.

The upshot is that when people think Algarve, they think Albufeira, the second most visited spot in Portugal, and when someone says to us “oh, you live in the Algarve, so you’re near Albufeira?”, we always give the same answer, no, definitely not. But between us it suits us just fine, as long as everyone piles in there we get to stay quiet elsewhere (so thank you Albufeira, just saying).

Who is Albufeira for? Beaches, beer and a break from the grey

Let’s call a spade a spade, Albufeira is built for people who live for beaches, drink and a good party, and we don’t say that snootily, we completely get that after months of work under a grey and rainy sky, you dream of somewhere sunny where the beer flows and your brain switches off for a week. What we understand less, personally, is people who already have a calm, easy life and still shut themselves away in all that, a bit like folks with a lovely life who spend eight days in Las Vegas (and the comparison isn’t even ours, the guidebooks call the place “the mini-Las Vegas of the Algarve”).

The party, by the way, grew exactly where the 1960s boom planted it, in the New Town, and its epicentre is “The Strip“, officially Avenida Sá Carneiro, over towards Montechoro and Oura beach, about 4km from the old town, an avenue of neon bars that has become the temple of British and Irish stag and hen dos. Its historic little sister sits in the old town, it’s Rua Cândido dos Reis, with its chain steakhouses, its Indian grill and live music promised on every corner, the kind of place where, even at 10 in the morning, I think there are too many screens, too much stuff, too much of everything.

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What hits you on arrival: the concrete and the missing windows

The first contact with Albufeira is a bit odd, you arrive and you see buildings that were never finished, whole floors with no windows and no glazing, perched above the shops, and I even took a photo of one, a genuinely abandoned block where, in the darkness of the empty floors, we thought we could make out the silhouette of a woman (two of us saw it, shivers guaranteed).

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Digging a little, I got my answer, and my hunch was right, these carcasses are the ghosts of the 2008 financial crisis, when the banks collapsed and thousands of building sites froze overnight across the country, leaving their concrete skeletons on the skyline. The Algarve, hooked on tourist property, took it full in the face, and the knockout blow came in 2011 when Portugal had to call in the Troika and sign a 78-billion-euro bailout, freezing construction for a whole decade, which is why, in the middle of a tourist town, you still stumble on half-born buildings nobody ever finished.

Past that faintly post-apocalyptic backdrop, you thread through the alleys and it’s a parade of restaurants and trinket shops, with squeaky animated plush toys, two-year-olds sitting on the pavement, and restaurants from every country on earth, all of them except one funnily enough, Portugal (you can feel the crowd comes more for the three-euro pint than for the octopus of the Ria Formosa). And I have to admit something, I spent 30 years on the French Riviera, so this seaside concrete, the crowds and the packaged fun give me a nagging sense of déjà vu, I find exactly what I came to Portugal to escape, and that’s why it’s not really my cup of tea.

The old town up top: where Albufeira turns Portuguese again

Thankfully there’s a moment where Albufeira redeems itself, and that’s when you climb, because as soon as you gain a bit of height everything changes, little cobbled streets, whitewashed houses and bougainvillea spilling everywhere (that flashy plant brought back from South America in the 18th century that loves the climate here), with the clifftop path running along the ocean above the fishermen’s beach, a genuinely lovely view. Those pure-white facades, by the way, aren’t just for the postcard, at first I thought they looked Greek, Cycladic even, before realising it’s a Moorish inheritance, from the five centuries when the town was called al-Buhera and faced North Africa, before Afonso III took it back in 1249, the white lime bouncing back the light and heat of the sun, air-con before its time.

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Up top you’ll come across the Porta de Santana, and behind that gentle name hides a real tragedy, because the Santa Ana district was wiped off the map on 1 November 1755 by the great Lisbon earthquake and its tsunami, which killed nearly 10% of the town’s people here, five times the Algarve average, many having fled onto the beach where the wave caught them. Little amateur-historian aside while we’re at it, I’d thought I recognised a Templar flag on a pediment, and once I checked I’d got it wrong, the town was handed to the Order of Aviz after the Reconquest (so much for reading History off a scrap of cloth).

Albufeira’s beaches: Pescadores, Falésia and why we head to Marinha

On to the beaches, the real reason all these people come, starting with Praia dos Pescadores, the fishermen’s beach, which has the merit of sitting right below the old town with its covered tunnel and its lifts, but whose sand disappointed me a little, yellow, coarse, full of broken shells and on a slope so steep that the moment the tide comes in it’s suddenly deep (not ideal for a gentle paddle). So for beauty we head elsewhere, starting with Praia da Falésia between Albufeira and Vilamoura, at the village of Olhos de Água (the “eyes of water”, after the freshwater springs that bubble up through the sand), six kilometres of ochre and red cliffs rising to 30 metres, carved by millions of years of wind and Atlantic, and regularly ranked among the most beautiful beaches in the world.

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And if you push west there’s the sublime Praia da Marinha (that one’s a stunner, as Caroline puts it) and above all the Benagil cave, that cathedral of rock whose skylight is nothing magical and everything geological, a 20-million-year-old limestone the sea patiently hollowed out until the roof collapsed inward, opening that eye onto the sky, which you reach by boat or kayak, and there you touch what the Algarve does best.

Eating in Albufeira? We’ll be honest: never, and here’s where to go instead

Here I have to make the most honest confession of this article, I don’t think we’ve ever once sat down in a restaurant in Albufeira, truly never, not out of snobbery but because faced with a row of “international cuisine” doing pizza-burger-tapas cheek by jowl, the Portuguese appetite just fizzles out. The snag is that the food follows the demand, the crowd comes for the cheap pint and the fish and chips more than for the best grilled octopus around, and it’s a shame, because the real octopus is caught just a few kilometres away, in the calm waters of the Ria Formosa.

So my tip, if you want to eat Portuguese, is to save your appetite and push on to Santa Luzia, the octopus capital, where since 1927 the fishermen have lowered alcatruzes to the lagoon floor, those terracotta pots the octopus crawls into for shelter before ending up on the plate (a technique inherited from the Phoenicians, no less), octopus lagareiro-style in a real fishing village and a bill that won’t make you miss home, because our rule is Albufeira for the atmosphere and dinner elsewhere.

So, is Albufeira worth it?

I can feel the question coming, so let’s answer it straight, yes Albufeira is worth the trip but not for what the town shouts loudest about, it’s worth it for the old town up top, its clifftop path, its flowered lanes, and as a base to radiate out to the spectacular beaches nearby. If you’re after the party with no strings, go for it, that’s exactly what it’s built for and it owns it, but if you’re after the quiet, authentic Portugal, spend half a day there for the view and the stroll then lay down your bags elsewhere in the Algarve (we’re the first to do exactly that).

Albufeira weather: an idea of what to expect

Weather-wise the Algarve keeps its sunshine promise for a good chunk of the year, but for Albufeira our advice fits in one line, skip the peak of summer, aim for autumn, winter or early spring. Here are the live conditions to help you time your visit.

Getting there and parking: why we don’t sleep here in a camper van

A word for our fellow vanlifers because it’s our thing, Albufeira really isn’t our favourite van stop, the spots aren’t great, often car parks high up the hill, and of a proper spot near the old town there simply isn’t one. So we treat it as a day trip from a base further east, and above all we go in winter or autumn, because in high summer it’s unbearable, the crowds and the heat rub out all the charm, whereas off-season the light is soft and the lanes can breathe. As for getting there without a car, note that the train doesn’t drop you in town, the station is out of the way, so allow a bus of around twenty minutes to reach the centre, usually via Faro.

To help you find your way, we’ve dropped all our useful points around Albufeira on the map, campsites, service areas, launderettes, car parks, but also our walking landmarks and the beaches, click each marker for the address and practical info.

What budget for a stay in Albufeira?

Albufeira is still a resort town, so prices climb fast in season, especially for seafront hotels and restaurants, but with a bit of common sense (coming off-season, eating Portuguese in the neighbouring villages) it stays very affordable. Here’s a budget estimate to help you picture it.

Quota RapidAPI dépassé (limite par minute/mois). Réessayez plus tard.

PS : if you ever spot the silhouette in the abandoned building, say hello from us, it’s been two years and we’re still wondering whether she’s waiting for the developers to come back and finish the job (spoiler, with the Troika involved, don’t hold your breath).