Independente Comporta

The ceramics in the rooms at Independente Comporta were made in Melides, and some of the rugs on the floor started out as plastic bottles. The brothers behind it had opened hotels in Lisbon and Porto before coming out to the country, to 12 hectares of pine set back from the sea, and they laid it out like a Portuguese village: 40 rooms with patios and 24 villas, whitewashed under terracotta roofs, with sand where the lanes would be. In the villas the beamed ceilings rise into the roof over a fireplace, and several have a pool of their own. Everyone else shares the saltwater pool in the middle, with canopied daybeds down one side and Bóia beside it, serving sourdough pizza from noon until seven.

Recommended for families with children over three, and for couples who do not mind sharing the pines with them. The kids club is free, takes three- to twelve-year-olds for treasure hunts and film nights, and runs from a quarter past three until a quarter to eleven, which sees out dinner at Maroto almost to the last spoonful. The cooking there is Alentejo, the black pork presa comes with a browned butter emulsion, and the lamps overhead look like Tutti Frutti sweets. The beaches at Pego and Carvalhal are a fifteen-minute drive, and the hotel can put you on a horse through the dunes and rice fields, or on a paddleboard on a lagoon nearby. And there are fire pits, retro ones, for the quarter of an hour between the kids club closing and the restaurant doing the same.