Lagos, Portugal: Falling in Love

There are places you visit because you’ve heard so much about them that you arrive carrying a suitcase full of expectations. Lagos wasn’t really one of those places for us.

We knew it was in Portugal’s Algarve. We knew it had beaches. We’d seen photographs of the coastline. It looked beautiful enough, certainly, but Europe has a rather unfair abundance of beautiful places, so we weren’t expecting Lagos to separate itself dramatically from the pack.

Then we saw the cliffs. Good grief. If Lagos consisted of nothing more than its coastline, I think it would still be worth coming here.

The southern Algarve has some of the most dramatic coastline we’ve seen anywhere - the kind that makes the beaches I grew up knowing along the eastern United States seem almost geographically bashful by comparison. Massive golden cliffs rise above turquoise water, arches have been carved through rock by centuries of wind and sea, and hidden beaches appear between formations that look as though someone had a particularly inspired afternoon designing them.

It’s spectacular. And yet what surprised Carla and me most about Lagos wasn’t simply the scenery. It was how comfortable we felt here.

Lagos is a relatively small town in southern Portugal with a wonderfully moderate climate. There always seemed to be a breeze moving through, which became one of those small pleasures we quickly stopped noticing until we realized how much we enjoyed it. Windows and doors stood open. Restaurants spilled onto sidewalks. Cafes filled the pedestrian streets with tables and chairs. Life seemed to take place as naturally outdoors as inside.

It made the whole town feel a little like one enormous open-air living room.

Nobody appeared particularly interested in going inside unless absolutely necessary. I could understand the reasoning.

The historic center is mostly made up of white and pale-colored buildings, many only two stories tall, occasionally three. There’s nothing monumental about the architecture. Lagos isn’t Paris. It isn’t Bordeaux. You don’t wander around all day craning your neck upward at magnificent buildings while wondering how people constructed such things before power tools.

And I think that’s part of its charm. For the town itself to compete with the drama of its coastline, it would almost have to be architecturally overwhelming. Instead, Lagos does something much wiser. It lets the cliffs have the starring role. The town remains human-sized. And I’ve come to appreciate that more and more when we travel.

There’s something wonderful about places where the buildings don’t overpower the people. Streets feel intimate. You can see the sky. Cafés become part of the architecture. People become part of the scenery rather than disappearing beneath skyscrapers and monumental facades.

Lagos feels built for walking, lingering, eating, talking, and occasionally forgetting what time it is. All things I support enthusiastically.

Carla and I have also learned something about ourselves during our travels: we’re usually less interested in asking, What is there to see? than we are in asking, How does it feel to be here?

Those are very different questions.

Of course we visit museums. We see churches, historic sites, ruins, galleries, and all the other things that guidebooks assure us we shouldn’t miss. But increasingly, I think the best museum is the place itself.

Walk the streets.

Sit in the square.

Buy something at the market.

Have coffee where people who actually live there have coffee.

Watch children heading home from school. Listen to conversations you don’t understand. Notice what people do with their evenings. See who sits together and how long they stay.

Breathe in the overallness of the place. Yes, I still like that word. I may have invented it years ago, but I’m keeping it.

By that criterion, Lagos did very well. Its mostly pedestrian streets were lively without feeling frantic. There were restaurants, little shops, bars, cafés, and people wandering in every direction, yet somehow the town remained relaxed. Plenty was happening, but Lagos didn’t seem particularly anxious about any of it.

That combination is harder to find than you might think.

We were also struck by how international the town felt. We heard Portuguese, of course, but also English, German, Dutch, Spanish, and languages we couldn’t identify at all. We met people from Brazil, Argentina, India, the United Kingdom, and throughout Europe. I love that.

There’s something about hearing multiple languages drifting through a street that has always felt reassuring to me. Different faces, different accents, different histories, different ways of seeing the world - all sharing the same sidewalks, cafés, beaches, and evening air.

Nobody needs to become less themselves for everyone to belong. To me, that’s one of the most beautiful sounds a town can make. And Lagos made it well.

Then, of course, there’s the ocean. We’ve never really been the sort of beach people who spend eight hours lying on the sand. I think I would last approximately seventeen minutes before wondering what else there was to do. But give me a trail above the sea and I’ll happily walk for miles. Lagos is magnificent for that.

Trails wind along the cliffs with one extraordinary view after another. Sometimes you’re looking down onto a small beach tucked between rock formations; moments later, the coastline opens into a vast sweep of Atlantic water and sky. Kayaks move beneath stone arches. Paddleboarders drift along the shoreline. Surfers wait for waves.

And everywhere, the sea is doing what the sea has apparently decided to do forever - moving, crashing, reshaping, and reminding us that human beings are not nearly as powerful as we occasionally like to imagine.

There were moments when Carla and I would simply stop walking and look.

Those are often my favorite moments when traveling. Nothing to accomplish. Nothing to check off. Just standing somewhere beautiful and being aware that somehow, improbably, you got to be there.

Within our first day or so in Lagos, another thought began creeping into the conversation. We could live here.

That doesn’t happen everywhere. There are places we absolutely love visiting that we know we would never want to call home. A place can be fascinating, beautiful, exciting, historically extraordinary - and still not feel particularly livable.

Lagos did. There was an ease to it. The scale felt right. Nature was always close. You could spend the morning walking the cliffs, have lunch at a café, wander through town in the afternoon, and return to the water as the light began to change. Nothing felt especially complicated.

And maybe that’s ultimately what we loved most. Lagos never seemed to be trying very hard to impress us. The coastline certainly had every right to show off, and did so extravagantly. But the town itself simply went about its business - friendly, international, walkable, lively, and relaxed. It turned out to be a combination that worked beautifully for us.

There are places you admire because they’re magnificent. Others you enjoy because they’re comfortable. Every now and then, you find somewhere that gives you a little of both.

Lagos was one of those places.

And if you’re wondering why I’ve managed to write all this without saying much about the food, there’s a perfectly good reason.

That deserves a story of its own.