Top Things to Do in Faro

The drive from Faro Airport to Carvoeiro unspools through ochre-colored countryside. It passes through Loulé and the low scrub hills of the western Algarve. Then the Atlantic appears on the horizon and the road drops toward the limestone cliffs of the coast. A private transfer eliminates the disorientation of a foreign rental car on unfamiliar roads. It delivers travelers to their accommodation already oriented, luggage intact, with a driver who can answer the first practical questions.

Faro's old town is approximately one kilometer across. The density of what it contains, Moorish walls, Gothic cathedral, Roman foundation stones visible through glass panels in café floors, the bone chapel at the Carmelite church, the bishop's palace that doubles as a municipal archive, means a tuk-tuk tour covers a compressed version of Portuguese history from the Roman occupation through the 1755 earthquake and beyond. The vehicle's small size allows it into the narrow lanes of the Cidade Velha that no tour bus reaches.

The interior Algarve is invisible from the beach. This small-group tour of six brings together three of its most singular sites. The Benagil sea caves, accessible only by water, whose domed limestone ceiling opens to a circle of sky above a sandy floor. The whitewashed hill village of Alte, whose streets smell of wood smoke and whose central fountain has supplied the town since the Moorish period. Loulé's covered market, whose nineteenth-century iron-and-tile structure encloses a trading floor where dried herbs, honey, and handmade leather goods are sold in the same stalls that have occupied the same positions for generations.

The western Algarve resorts, Alvor, Portimão, Praia da Rocha, Ferragudo, sit between sixty and ninety minutes from Faro Airport by road. The journey through the flat coastal plain that makes up the central Algarve feels longer in a shared shuttle stopping at three hotels before yours. A private transfer covers the same route without detours. You arrive at the destination with time and energy intact. Ferragudo in particular, a working fishing village across the river from Portimão, its whitewashed houses stacked above a shingle beach, is the kind of arrival that deserves to be made without the ambient anxiety of a shared vehicle.