Key takeaways
- Most of the time on the water is the cliffs between.
- White houses on a hill above a working fishing harbour.
- Ponta do Altar, where the river coast becomes the cliff coast.
- Kilometres of gold limestone, hollowed, pierced and standing offshore.
Out of the river
Portimao sits on the Arade, and the first few minutes of any trip from here are river rather than sea: a working waterfront, fishing boats, the marina, and the road bridge behind.
On the eastern bank as you come downstream is Ferragudo, and it is the first thing worth putting a camera down for. White houses stacked up a hillside above a small harbour, a church at the top, boats drawn up on the mud at low water. It is a working village that happens to be photogenic rather than a preserved one.
Guarding the river mouth are two forts, one on each bank, built when a river this size was worth defending and now mostly worth looking at. The one on the Ferragudo side sits on a rock above the beach and is the more striking of the pair.
Then the river opens and the boat is at sea, and the character changes within a minute.
Portimao itself is a working port rather than a resort, with a fishing fleet, a shipyard and a marina all sharing the same river, and the first ten minutes are a fair look at how the Algarve earns its living when nobody is photographing it.
Praia da Rocha and the point
West of the river mouth is Praia da Rocha, a long beach backed by a resort town, and it is included here mostly because of what stands on it.
The sand is scattered with isolated rock towers, some of them substantial, standing free with the sea around their feet. They are stacks: the remains of a cliff line that the sea worked past, leaving the hardest parts behind. From the beach they are curiosities. From the water they line up.
East of the river the coast turns and rises, and on the point is the lighthouse at Ponta do Altar, a white tower on an orange cliff. It marks the transition, and it is a useful one to notice: everything before it is river and beach, and everything after it is cliff.
From here on the coast does not let up until well past Benagil.
Orange cliffs standing above green water
The cliff coast
This is the part that people describe afterwards, usually with some surprise, because nobody sold it to them.
The cliffs run continuously at sixty or seventy metres, layered in gold, cream, orange and grey, and the sea has been working on their base for a very long time. The result is a face that is hollowed at the waterline along its entire length.
Caves are everywhere, most of them unnamed and unlisted. Some are shallow scoops, some go back further than a boat can follow, some connect. Arches are frequent enough that a good skipper will take you under one or two where the water is deep enough and the swell is right.
And there are stacks standing offshore, isolated towers with vegetation on top, each one the surviving half of an arch that failed. Once somebody has explained that sequence you cannot look at this coast without reading it.
The colour is worth watching rather than just noticing. The same face reads pale cream at midday and deep orange in the late afternoon, because the iron in the limestone responds to the angle of the light. People who go out twice on the same coast often do not recognise it the second time.
What the skipper does with it
This is where a private boat earns its keep on the run rather than at the cave.
There is no fixed route through this stretch and no obligation to hold a straight line. A skipper working for one party can go in close where the water allows, hold position in front of something interesting, take the boat through an arch, or push on if your group would rather be at the cave.
Ask. The single most underused feature of a private charter is that the person driving it knows this coast intimately and will happily point the boat at whatever you are curious about.
It also means the trip is different every time, which is worth knowing if you are comparing accounts online. Two people describing the same booking will have seen a different selection of the same coast.
The coast
Between Portimao and Benagil the cliff face is hollowed at the waterline along almost its entire length. The famous cave is one hole among hundreds.
How long it takes
Portimao to Benagil is not far in a straight line, and the boat does not go in a straight line.
On the shorter options the run out and back accounts for most of the time on the water, with the cave as the turning point. On the full day there is time to go further east past Benagil, to linger, and to stop.
That ratio is worth thinking about when choosing. If the cave is the only thing you want, the shorter option delivers it. If the coast is what you are actually buying, and after reading this it probably should be, the longer options are where the value sits.
Either way the return leg is not a repeat. Light on this coast changes completely through the day, and a cliff face that looked flat and pale on the way out is gold and full of shadow coming back.
