Comporta

Comporta sits behind the dunes south of Tróia where the Sado's floodplain is farmed for rice - flooded paddies stretching inland, worked with storks standing in them, backed by cork oak and umbrella pine and fronted by more than twenty kilometres of dune-backed Atlantic beach that is genuinely empty for most of its length. The estate that owned most of it belonged to the Espírito Santo banking family, and its sale after the bank's collapse in 2014 opened the area to development. What has happened since is the story: Comporta became fashionable, then very fashionable, with restaurants, beach clubs and villa prices to match, and the tension between the low-key thatched aesthetic it sells and the scale of building now proposed is the local argument. The beaches, the paddies and the storks are still there, and outside July and August it is still quiet.

What you actually see

• The rice paddies - flooded fields inland with storks working them.
• The beaches - more than twenty kilometres of dune-backed empty Atlantic sand.
• The pine and cork - umbrella pine and cork oak between the fields and the sea.
• The transformation - a farming area turned fashionable since the 2014 estate sale.

When to go

May to September. Two to four days. July and August are busy and expensive; June and September are much better.

Honest expectations

Prices are high and rising - restaurants and accommodation cost more than comparable places elsewhere in Portugal. Beaches have few facilities and Atlantic currents are strong. Mosquitoes near the paddies at dusk. A car is essential.

Nearby

Tróia is north up the spit; Alcácer do Sal is inland on the river.