Why we built Blue Cove in Porto Covo

We are a Portuguese family who have lived a long way from Portugal for a long time. The UAE has been home in the practical sense, the one made of work and school and the everyday. Portugal stayed home in the other sense, the one that does not move.

Porto Covo is where that stopped being abstract. We came, and then we kept coming back. It is a beautiful place with genuinely kind people, and it has held on to something a lot of this coast has traded away. When we try to explain Portugal to someone who has never been, this is the village we describe.

Some of it is selfish. Coming back here is how we relive our own childhoods, the summers that made us. Being able to hand that to our son is close to the best thing we have.

What we were trying to fix

We have stayed in hotels and rentals across Portugal and across the world for decades. Blue Cove is, honestly, a list of the things that went wrong in them.

So we decorated it like somewhere we could actually live. Not staged for a photograph, and not the cheapest version of a look. Functional, in materials that survive being used by real people on holiday.

We put in the things we kept missing. A washing machine and a dryer, because a week with a family generates laundry and a week at the beach generates sand. A pool heater, because the Atlantic is bracing well into May and an unheated pool is an ornament.

We spent seriously on the mattresses, and this is the one we care most about. We have stayed in beautiful properties, with views worth the entire trip, and woken up with a back that ruined the day after. It happens constantly and almost nobody mentions it. The beds here are the best we could buy.

And we arranged the place around the view rather than merely pointing a window at it. Somewhere you can actually sit, furniture placed so that people end up talking for three hours instead of drifting off to separate rooms.

What we actually want

We want it used. We want it to be the place where a family builds the memories they come back for, the ones children carry into their own adulthood. That is the purpose of this apartment. It is not a yield calculation.

The one thing we will not take credit for

We will have got things wrong. If something falls short while you are here, that is ours, and we are sorry for it.

But it will not be Porto Covo. The village has never let us down and neither have the people in it. Whatever we failed to get right, step outside and they will make up for it.