Slow Travel in the Algarve

We booked one apartment in a small town on the Algarve for three weeks and did not plan a single day. The first week felt like a mistake. By the second the woman at the bakery knew our order, and by the third we had a favourite rock to swim from that no guidebook mentions. Slow travel trades breadth for depth on purpose. You see one place rather than six, and you see it in its weekday clothes: the market on Tuesday, the bar when the football is on, the beach before the day-trippers arrive. It is also, unexpectedly, cheaper and calmer. No transfers, no packing, no decisions about where next. The holiday stops being a project to complete and becomes, briefly, a life you are living somewhere else.