Skip the Algarve crowds and head inland, where whitewashed hill towns and terraced vineyards show a slower, older Portugal.
Évora is the natural place to start: a walled university town with a Roman temple standing incongruously in the main square and a bone chapel that draws more visitors than either. Rent a car here rather than on the coast — the Alentejo's appeal is in its emptiness, cork oak plains rolling to the horizon with barely another vehicle in sight, and public transport between the small towns is sparse at best.
Push on to Marvão, a fortified village perched so high on a granite ridge that on a clear day you can see into Spain. Stay a night if you can; the day-trippers leave by five and the narrow streets empty out into something close to silence, broken only by swifts wheeling around the castle walls at dusk.
From there it's a half-day's drive north to the Douro Valley, where terraced vineyards climb near-vertical slopes above the river in a landscape that looks engineered rather than grown. Base yourself in Pinhão and take one of the small wooden rabelo boats out onto the water in the late afternoon — the light on the terraces then is the reason painters have been coming here for two centuries, and most quintas along the river will pour you a glass of port to go with the view.
