02 — The House Alto Alentejo · Est. 1780
Four years of patient restoration.
The story
A house that was
never in a hurry.
The monte was raised in 1780 to work the land, not to look at it. Everything we love about it follows from that.
Walls a metre thick because summer demanded it. Small windows to the west, deep verandas to the south, a courtyard that catches the evening wind off the river. When we began the restoration in 2019, the brief to our architects was one sentence: change nothing that works.
Four years later the house holds thirty guests, a kitchen, a cellar and a library — and still cools itself the way it did when Queen Maria was on the throne. The swallows kept their nests. So did we.
See the suites
Two centuries
The long version.
The monte is raised
Baltasar Vaz de Almada builds a working farmstead above the river bend — granite footings, taipa walls, a threshing floor that survives as our terrace.
The chapel and the cellar
The second family adds a private chapel and digs the barrel cellar into the hillside. Both stand unaltered; the cellar now rests twelve hundred vintages.
The Salgados arrive
Marta’s grandparents buy the estate with its last harvest still in the barns. Three generations work the cork and the vines through every version of Portugal that follows.
Restoration begins
Thirty-two artisans — masons, carpenters, a lime-plaster crew from Évora — begin four years of work. Ninety-six percent of the materials travel less than forty kilometres.
First guests
Vespera opens with nine suites and one long table. The first dinner runs four hours; nobody asks for the wifi password until day three.
The meadow rewilds
Eleven hectares go back to seed and the fourteenth suite opens in the old granary. The work, as ever, continues slowly.
The house rules
What we hold to.
Slowness is the luxury
No schedules pushed under doors. Breakfast runs until noon. Checkout is a conversation, not a deadline.
The land comes first
We are a working estate before we are a hotel. Cork, wine and honey pay their own way — guests share the place, not a set.
One table
Dinner is communal because the Alentejo is. You may take a tray to your terrace, but you will be missed.
Craft over polish
Hand-thrown plates that don’t quite match. Linen that softens with age. Perfect is the enemy of warm.
Privacy without silence
Fourteen suites on two hundred and forty hectares. Solitude is easy to find; so is company, at the hour you want it.
Leave it better
Every stay funds the rewilding ledger — meadow, riverbank, owl boxes. We publish the accounts each winter.
The keepers
The people who
keep the hours.
Marta Salgado
Keeper of the House
João Ferreira
Chef — The Table
Alice Duarte
Head Gardener
Tomás Reis
Estate & Trails
“My grandmother said this house had two speeds — harvest, and Sunday. We restored it for the Sundays.”
