The Quiet Season

Carvoeiro is the closest thing I have found to my beloved Zihuatanejo.

Zihua is the only place where I truly read. I do not mean skimming a few pages before falling asleep. I mean putting my phone in the safe, rejecting all relationships with screens, and finishing an actual book. No television. No computer. No phone. Just time.

Our first full winter in Portugal, we spent a week in Carvoeiro, I tried the same thing. It worked. We stayed at Algar Seco in a lovely apartment with a fireplace, and for a few days I remembered what it felt like not to be available. We walked, ate well, drank good wine, and watched the winter light move across the cliffs. And, I read.

Then Resonate grew. January became a month for preparing tours, answering inquiries, solving problems, and trying to stay ahead of everything coming next. Now we usually arrive in Carvoeiro with a group, sometimes two, and the place has become somewhere I love to share rather than somewhere I disappear. I miss having it entirely to myself, but I also understand why I want other people to experience it.

Carvoeiro in winter is not the Algarve most people picture. The bars and grills that spill onto the streets in summer are often closed. The beach is quiet. The town is not performing quite so hard for visitors. Only the hardy restaurants stay open, and those are often the ones we love most: welcoming places with friendly service and very little pretense.

There is a wine bar where you order the wine by the glass and they decide what food should accompany it. How wonderful is that?

There are beaches that feel almost abandoned, especially when the sky turns moody.

There is the Seven Hanging Valleys trail in the gentler light of winter, without the heat pressing down or crowds filling every viewpoint. The cliffs glow differently at that time of year. After rain, the wet rock catches the sun, and showers sometimes glisten across the blue water in the distance.

It is never really cold. You may need the scarf you knitted over the summer and a pair of long pants, but the parka can stay packed until you land in Toronto.

For a group, the little apartment with the fireplace was never going to work, so we moved to the Tivoli Carvoeiro. Calling that a compromise would be ridiculous. The hotel sits above a cove with one of those views that makes you stop talking for a moment when you first see it. The minute I arrive, something shifts. The stress begins to leave. I settle in. The place feels familiar almost immediately, even when I am there to work. And there is still somewhere to sit with a book.

That may be what I love most about Carvoeiro. It gives me permission to do less, not because there is nothing to do, but because the place does not seem offended when I choose not to do it.

Winter makes that permission even clearer. The coast is still beautiful. The food is still good. The wine is still waiting. The cliffs and sea continue doing what they have always done, whether anyone is watching or not.

You can walk. You can explore. You can follow the trail, find the quiet beach, or linger over lunch. Or you can sit down with a book and, for once, actually finish it. And then perhaps wonder whether you really need to go home at all.