"A place to retire" Cabanas by tompt

Cabanas is a small town in the Algarve region. In winter it is filled with retired people from all over Europe. It seemed they were most dutch and all the restaurants, that were open in winter, had a dutch menu as well as a portugese, english and french one. To make it worse the waiters even spoke some dutch...
Maybe this is nice when you are much older and just want some quiet place where it is warmer in winter than at home. But to us it was not what we expected from a small portugese village. The beach at Cabanas is only reachable by boat (omly euro p.p.) and only during the day in winter. So no beach walks after dinner, and walking through the village is not very interesting, and certainly not a long walk.

Boats along the coast, Cabanas, Portugal

But never the less we enjoyed our week here. The food in the restaurants was good, especially if you like seafood. And it was always possible to walk to our appartment after a bottle of fine portugese wine, no trouble with drinking and driving. We had rented a car in advance and that was a good idea. During the day we discovered the rest of the Algarve region, like the nearby (9 km) Tavira and other historic towns. More about this daytrips will be on our Algarve page.

The old fort overlooking the ocean, Cabanas.

So what has Cabanas to offer?

- good priced accomodation
- good (fish)restaurants, with traditional portugese dishes
- an old castle, which was not open to the public when we visited
- small fishing boats along the coast
- a beach on an island a few hundred meters from the coastline