Comporta

For most of its history Comporta was a farm: an estate on the Sado estuary that grew rice and made salt. From 1991 its owners, the Espírito Santo banking family, began turning it towards holidays and inviting their friends; when the bank collapsed in 2014 a court ordered the estate sold, and in 2019 Paula Amorim bought control. Most of the land is still rice field, salt pan and protected dune, and the building rules are strict enough that the best houses here are hard to see from the road.

Stay

Newer Arrivals

Casas na Areia (Sado estuary) — Four small buildings by Manuel Aires Mateus for João Rodrigues, begun in 2010: two in timber and reed, two in white concrete, under thatch cut by a local craftsman from grasses on the riverbank. The floor of the living pavilion is sand, heated from below in winter. It sleeps eight.