Viceroy at Ombria

Viceroy at Ombria is a hill village put up all at once, which is not how hill villages usually happen. Whitewashed houses step up a slope of the Barrocal, the limestone foothills north of Loulé, under terracotta roofs and chimney pots, with arched loggias and a square white tower over the pool terrace where a village would hang its church bell. Promontorio designed it, and it opened in October 2024. Indoors there are azulejo tiles and dark beams across the ceilings, and the café, Central, describes itself as the village's heart, which is a lot for a café to take on. The rooms to book have Valley View and Terrace in their names: herringbone terracotta behind a white lattice parapet, the valley below, and the golf course, which opened in 2023 and so had a year's start on the hotel.

Recommended for families who would rather have the Algarve's hills than its coast, and for couples happy to share the place with them, since one of the four pools is for adults only and so is the spa, where treatments start at sixteen. The kids club takes four- to eleven-year-olds, and the destination fee covers the first hour of each day; after that the clock is running. Even the rooms at the bottom of the price list are generous, by guests' accounts. The sand is at Vale do Lobo, half an hour away on the resort's shuttle, but the hills are nearer. Querença, five minutes' drive, has a market square and a sixteenth-century church; Alte, fifteen, has cobbled lanes and swimming holes, so a swim need not mean the shuttle. And since a village wants a castle, Ombria has one, with a bar on top: Casa E Fora, looking out over the golf course and the hills.