Where to Stay in Albufeira — Best Hotels & Neighbourhoods

It depends entirely on where you stay, and it is worth deciding before you book the hotel. In the Old Town, no — you can walk to beaches, restaurants and the bus station, and taxis are plentiful and cheap. But most of the hotels on this coast sit outside town at Falésia, Açoteias, Salgados or Olhos de Água, where without a car you depend on taxis for every dinner. If you plan day trips to Lagos, Silves or Cape St Vincent, take the car. If you intend to sit by a pool for a week, save the money and the parking headache.

Olhos de Água and Santa Eulália are the usual answers: quiet, level, with a promenade and a good restaurant scene. Salgados suits anyone who wants a flat beach with no steps at all. Praia da Falésia and Açoteias are peaceful and green but need a car. The Old Town works well if you want to walk to everything and can cope with cobbles and slopes — but pick a hotel with a lift. Avoid Areias de São João altogether, and be cautious about Praia da Oura in high summer.

Harder than the brochures suggest. Albufeira’s cliffs are twenty to thirty metres high and most hotels sit on top of them. The free Elevador do Peneco solves it in the Old Town when it is running, and the tunnel off Rua 5 de Outubro gives step-free access to Praia dos Pescadores. Pine Cliffs and Hotel Sol e Mar have their own lifts. Everywhere else, ask the hotel directly how many steps there are before you book — “a five-minute walk to the beach” here frequently means a hundred stairs each way.

Only in one district, and it is easily avoided. The reputation comes from The Strip at Areias de São João — perhaps eight hundred metres of bars catering to stag and hen parties — and from parts of Praia da Oura in July and August. The rest of the municipality is quite different: the Old Town is pretty and family-run, the marina is calm, and Olhos de Água, Santa Eulália, Falésia and Salgados are positively sedate. Choose your neighbourhood carefully and Albufeira is an easy, comfortable, English-speaking base.

Cool. This is the Atlantic, not the Mediterranean, and even in August the water reaches only about seventy-two degrees — refreshing rather than warm, and noticeably chilly in June. In winter it falls to the high fifties. The beaches shelve fairly steeply in places and there can be a shore break; blue flags and lifeguards are the norm in season. Most older visitors end up doing their swimming in a heated hotel pool and using the sea for paddling and long, flat walks at low tide, which is no bad holiday at all.

For July and August, book by January — the best rooms at the big cliff-top resorts go early and peak rates roughly double. For June, September or October, eight to twelve weeks ahead is usually enough and you will pay noticeably less; September in particular runs something like forty percent below August for a comparable room. As a rough guide, a simple three-star in the Old Town starts under a hundred dollars off-peak, four-star apartments from about a hundred and seventy, and the five-star clifftop resorts climb well past three hundred and fifty in high summer.