The scorched earth ends with precision. One side of the road is a scattering of blackened stumps, the other side a carpet of pristine green, like the stuff greengrocers used to put under their shop displays.
This is Quinta do Lago, less nestled and more flag-planted in the eastern Algarve, a huge privately owned resort of 2,000 acres. Or, proudly, ‘three times the size of Monaco’.
The net worth of most individuals here might be similar to Monaco too, because while anyone can rent a hotel room or a private villa for reasonable money, real estate changes hands for millions of euros, something that apparently only grew in lockdown as ex-pats cashed their chips and moved here wholesale to enjoy a life of some luxury.
Especially if you happen to like golf, because Quinta do Lago is the place that made golf synonymous with the Algarve.
But as we all know from some years back, cycling is the new golf, which although a phrase I shudder at is in essence the reason that ex-pro rider and my ride buddy for the day Marcus is waiting for me in Quinta do Lago’s Bike Shed.
This is the resort’s guiding, hire and service centre, and its presence reflects two things: one, the changing tastes of the resort’s clientele; and two, the fact that the Algarve has some challenging and quite beautiful terrain. And with most people on the links, that’s going to leave a lot of road for us.
Best laid plans
The Algarve isn’t exactly Alpine, but it is really quite lumpy, and heading further west those lumps begin to increase in stature until you hit the Serra do Monchique mountain range, of which the highest peak – and by extension the Algarve’s – is Alto da Fóia.
Now, I’m not from around here, and although Marcus is Quinta do Lago’s cycling expert, he doesn’t tend to come this far west with clients. I’ve lobbied hard to get him to take me here, having read that Fóia is the scalp of the area, and hence it is I who planned this route, and hence this is why we elect to start in Portimão, because I read on some internet forum that this is a good place to start a ride. It is not.
The actual harbourside of western Algarve’s biggest city is lovely, fishing boats bobbing, herons nesting atop dockside loading cranes (a common sight here apparently, although it wows me when I see it), the sea a calm blue.
But the passage out of town is frankly unedifying. Doable, certainly, but by the time we turn left off the N124 (typically roads with nomenclature aren’t that fun), it’s clear we’d have been better off starting just north of Porto de Lagos.
My mood, however, is soon buoyed by Marcus and how effusive he has become about the country road we’re now on. Its reach seems endless, its fresh tarmac devoid of much but an occasional scuttling lizard, its skies empty save for circling birds. It winds far north into distant rusty hills.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever been here before,’ Marcus says in wonder, which of course leaves my heart swelling with route-planning pride.
Searching for cyclists
Our first major waypoint is Alferce, where murals of cyclists adorn the town’s walls, relics of Voltas ao Algarve past. In classic hill-town style, the passage up here slowly steepens and narrows in a relationship directly proportional to the number of sweat spatters on my stem.
Our first major waypoint is Alferce, where murals of cyclists adorn the town’s walls, relics of Voltas ao Algarve past. In classic hill-town style, the passage up here slowly steepens and narrows in a relationship directly proportional to the number of sweat spatters on my stem.
Our arrival is greeted by shuffling old-timers, at the time of their lives the Sphinx would call walking on three legs, and shuffling in very stark contrast to the tanned, smiling older faces we left behind in Quinta do Lago. The living up here today looks idyllic, but one can imagine how tough it is to carve out an existence on top of a Portuguese mountain where the land is the area’s major employer.
For us on our bikes, however, Alferce is sunny and crisp, and its long views prove a splendid accompaniment as we head west to Monchique, progress steep enough to limit speed but not so steep as to reduce my gaze to the floor.
When we arrive, Monchique is evidently a much different beast to Alferce. It has shiny shops, little parks and a fire station that, given other scorched areas we’ve seen already, must be in constant use.
In the town square we find our people: cyclists. Racks of bikes sit outside the Velochique cycling cafe, dozens of Lyrca-clads in various states of repair sipping coffee, some having been up and come down, some meeting to begin their ascent. Climbing from Monchique to Fóia is the thing to do if you cycle here, and Velochique would seem to be the natural muster point.
Round the houses
I have deliberately contrived our ascent of Fóia to be a circuitous one. Again this is due to more remote research, but according to a chap called Jeff Jones of Flyingeese cycle-tours, along with the climb to Alferce that we’ve just done, and the road we’ll take to Fóia, another must-do here is a trip through Death Valley.
I’m not quite sure if Death Valley is merely the M501 or perhaps the unnamed road it joins up to, and neither is Marcus. But I can at least safely surmise as our bikes hurtle downhill that we must be heading to a valley of sorts. Then, if any residual doubt remains, the road plateaus, then begins to rise steeply, which at least fits with descriptions I’ve read – one end of Death Valley is a short, steep set of hairpins.
What I’d heard less about is the off-grid mini-villages and dwellings in this area, which Marcus explains are wholly illegal but ultimately tolerated by the state. These are dilapidated campers and semi-permanent campsites in which all manner of nationalities, save for actual Portuguese, live. T
hese are the kinds of travelling hippies Portugal is famous for, says Marcus, only a bit older and more old-school. Less the trust-fund types who’ve come to live out of a van and surf; more the part-time communists once trying to change the world. And in their own way they have, because here they are managing to live with little more than a borehole and a barbeque. Good on ’em.
Soon, though, the road is much too steep, the cork and pine forests much too dense for anyone to live in. Any sounds are muted by the foliage, our progress a wonderful mixture of tranquillity and toil. Then without any ceremony we reach the crest of the climb and the forest ejects us onto a busy road. I say busy; it is wide enough to warrant a line down the middle, and we see two cars.
Unnecessarily satisfying
So far we have sort of been circling Fóia, gaining and losing height in a highly enjoyable yet pointless exercise – if you looked at our route we would appear like explorers lost in a snow storm, coming agonisingly close to the peak before skirting erroneously away.
However, this is cycling in its most brilliant sense, without specific concerns of time; riders just driven by the pursuit of roads on which to cycle. As we climb past the town of Marmelette, however, I am suddenly bitten by a need to be at least slightly efficient in our progress.
Back home at my laptop, there was a lovely left turn to be had that would neatly cut across to join the last third of the main climb to Fóia. How cunning I was to find this road; how I would wow the local riders when they saw this incredible gambit.
Marcus and I stop pedalling and sit on our top tubes and look at this secret turning, and it is immediately obvious why Garmin Connect tried to resist me using it. It is muddy, narrow and boulder-strewn, good only for tanks and donkeys. In simultaneous defeat, out come our phones to find an alternative route.
I try to hide how deflated I am, especially when we realise the only thing to do is to loop all the way back around to pretty much where we took up the start of this road in the first place. As my partner will tell you, I couldn’t Google Map my way out of a paper bag, and so it has come to pass.
Still, as it turns out the extra kilometres are really quite good and I resolve to double-down on my position that getting lost is a good thing. You discover more, and it’s why I do it. This is a shinier, newer road that weaves satisfyingly, and not un-punishingly, around what feels like one of two bands of contours. Like a warped record on a turntable we are neither truly losing or gaining height, just bobbing between these two states, spiralling round this mountain.
This feeling that things have turned out quite well actually lasts until we are very much retracing our steps on a road previously ridden in a manner I can’t deny is somewhat soul-destroying, and one fast becoming incredibly tough on my legs. This sense of abjection and failure is compounded when we hit the climb to Fóia proper.
I’m not really sure what I was expecting, but whether it’s from the mental anxiety of un-forecast kilometres or the steepness of the road, the general freedom and joy I had been feeling turns to me just feeling a bit sick. The woozy kind of sick, where my head starts to feel tight, my legs start to radiate dull aches out of my kneecaps and I can taste iron somewhere around my oesophagus.
Fire and scree
More forest fires apparently wiped out a lot of vegetation here, which has yet to grow back beyond green fields, says Marcus, but for whatever reason (the grazing, bell-donging cattle definitely help), the last stretches of broken tarmac to Fóia’s summit have an Alp-cum-moonscapeness to it that I really wasn’t expecting.
Up until now the Algarve has been either a dry red or a lush-pine green, but here the mountain has turned near bald. This adds to my struggle as it means I can now see the top, and the top is growing bigger at an agonisingly glacial pace.
Marcus, ever the gent as well as the experienced bike guide, does all the right things to chaperone me to the top. That is, he rides just in front and he doesn’t talk – the former making him an achievable target, the latter making me feel like it’s not just me blowing so hard out of his proverbial that he can barely grunt.
When we reach the peak – a car park, some radio aerials and a view point with a delightful little cafe truck below it (I can vouch for this over the much larger and more obvious restaurant) – all is forgotten.
The hazy view south towards the ocean is less arresting, more gently affirming of the exploits to get here, and there is a rather fun statue of a cyclist with our height – 902m – inscribed on the plinth. It’s apparently a piece inspired by Remco Evenepoel, who triumphed on this mountain and won the Volta ao Algarve in 2020 (he also won in 2022 – the Belgian must like this race).
This lifts my spirits, because this is clearly a mountain that’s tough enough to warrant professional assaults captured in steel. I’d imagine Remco found it pretty hard, which is a reminder that suffering just comes down to how hard you ride the thing in front of you.
Still, as we make our descent back to where we started, sweat drying to crusts in the wind, the last drips of water taken from bottles, I ponder how much I underestimated this ride, and just how differently I’d do it next time.
I’d start from further inland; I’d keep our detour. And I’d definitely come back again.
The rider’s ride
KTM Revelator Alto Elite, £3,530, ktm-bikes.at
B&B Hotels’ Men in Glaz may have been sent packing as their team folded at the end of last year, but their chosen bike – the KTM Revelator Alto – will live on, and happily so.
This Elite-level guise is sensibly specced to hit a price point, mixing Shimano Ultegra R8000 chainset, rear mech and front mech with 105 R7000 levers and callipers, then slotting in some Mavic Ksyrium S wheels. I have no complaints with the functionality of this mix-match drivetrain, but while Mavic’s alloy wheels are stiff and strong, upgrading to a set weighing less than the Ksyrium’s 1,670g would really open up the Revelator’s capabilities.
Because this is an on-the-money bike, wind-tunnel-tested and with racy geometry – think short chainstays, short head tube and low bottom bracket. It’s also lively, in part thanks to skinny fork legs and slim seatstays, which give the platform a decent bit of spring. Just change out those wheels to really hear it sing.
A resort is born
Quinta-sential guide to one of the Algarve’s wealthiest areas
Quinta do Lago is an interesting beast. Now in its 50th year and functioning like a pretty sizable town, it was once just marshland rolling down to the sea. That was until a Brazilian developer, André Jordan, dreamt up an idea to create a luxury resort here, which came to fruition in 1972 but was then abruptly halted by the military coup of 25th April 1974 and resulting Carnation Revolution in Portugal (so called as almost no shots were fired).
The banks from which Jordan borrowed money were nationalised, Quinta do Lago came under state control and Jordan returned to Brazil. By 1981 the country had stabilised and Quinta do Lago was returned to Jordan; it then changed hands again in the late 1980s.
Then, in 1998, Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien bought the resort, which might explain why, along with the young tennis prodigies, football teams and octogenarian padel players that can be seen around the resort’s Campus sports area, Stephen Roche, son Nico and nephew Dan Martin all come to ride here from time to time.
How we did it
Accommodation
We stayed at the Quinta do Lago Resort (quintadolago.com), which is about a 30-minute drive from the nearest airport, Faro, and home to a wide range of accommodation, from hotels to rental villas. Quinta do Lago is also home to The Campus, which is a truly incredible sports complex comprising everything from Olympic pools to 3G pitches to The Bike Shed, where you can rent bikes, buy kit or get a service.
Restaurants
Quinta do Lago is a sprawling resort that contains various restaurants, but without a shadow of a doubt Bovino Steakhouse is among the very best. It’s expensive, and yes this is a very meaty place, but food and wine was superb and the service absolutely impeccable in the non-stuffy way.
Thanks
Thanks to Marcus Ornellas of The Bike Shed, who was a superb guide and a very patient rider – he is fast, we were slow. Thanks also to Joana Oliveira from Quinta do Lago, who hosted us at the resort, and Isabelle Thomas from Grifco PR for facilitating the trip.
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