1. São Lourenço Do Barrocal, Portugal
Beyond the trendy restaurants housed in azulejo-clad buildings in Porto, there’s Alentejo—a vast countryside region that’s a veritable culinary destination. Tell locals you’re heading there and they’ll congratulate you for uncovering the “real Portugal”, and then go on to share their list of must-eats.
About a two-hour drive from Lisbon, Alentejo often draws comparisons to Provence and Tuscany, but the landscape and the feeling is completely different. It’s more pastoral than posh, and devoid of any pretention. The region’s character shapes São Lourenço do Barrocal, an idyllic farmscape retreat in a small village between the towns of Évora and Monsaraz. The hotel takes up a small slice of the estate’s 780 hectares, carefully tended to by the same family for more than 200 years; it continues to operate as a working farm to this day.
(Related: A Taste of Portugal in Malacca)