Postcard from Alentejo

POSTCARD FROM | CABANA TRAVEL | WORLD OF CABANA

In the Alentejo, Portugal, craft and life cohabit with poise. Travel writer Sarah Siese explores the region and finds that São Lourenço do Barrocal, a remote 2,000-acre estate in the foothills of Monsaraz, is both a refuge and a revelation that contemporary luxury may, after all, be founded on radical simplicity.

BY SARAH SIESE | CABANA TRAVEL | 1 DECEMBER 2025

São Lourenço do Barrocal, a remote 2,000-acre estate in the foothills of Monsaraz.

There’s a moment, just after dawn, when the Alentejo light seems to rise not from the horizon but from the earth itself – slow, golden, and patient. It spills across granite boulders and wide-shouldered oaks, catching on whitewashed walls of centuries-old farms. The air tastes faintly of rosemary and mineral dust; and time, like the vines that curl lazily along the low stone walls, appears to stretch.

São Lourenço do Barrocal is what the Celts might have called a thin place – where the veil between worlds feels gossamer and where the ordinary becomes transcendent. It has a presence. And I welcome its bidding to slow down. I love this remote 2,000-acre estate in the foothills of Monsaraz, its granitic soil coaxing life from the land, shaping a rural rhythm that pulsed for generations.

Once a thriving agricultural community, silence followed, with years of abandonment after the Carnation Revolution. The susurrant murmur of wind through broken shutters; the land waiting for someone to remember. That someone was vivacious José António Uva, the eighth generation of a family who first made this their home.

His vision was not to resurrect grandeur but to, “restore belonging, to let the bones of the place speak again.” Working with architect Eduardo Souto de Moura, he reimagined the estate with a kind of quiet courage: simple forms, natural textures, nothing superfluous.

A vast wide cobbled street still punctuates the space between cottages and stables, but now there’s an organic garden filled with vegetables and the restaurant’s signature pennyroyal, wine ferments in giant 19th-century amphorae, and a Susanne Kaufmann Spa exudes apothecarist repair.

Everything at Barrocal is made by hand – and with heart. I covet the rugs and cushions that are woven on centuries old wooden looms by a small group of women in Fabricaal, in nearby Reguengos de Monsaraz, their motifs telling stories of shepherds and cornfields. There are tapestries from Arraiolos, and pottery from São Pedro do Corval, where Hélène Falé draws inspiration from the region’s pigments and wildflowers. Even the restaurant’s plates – crafted through a collaboration between artist Marta Lucas and Estudio Caldas da Rainha – carry a quiet humility in their celebration of nonidentical imperfection.

I took a morning ride on a Lusitano horse across fields freckled with wildflowers; pausing beneath an ancient menhir to feel the wind shift; followed by a slow lunch by the vines feasting on peixinhos da horta, and partridge escabeche, with honey and walnut cake to finish. Later, a swim under an apricot sky. And always, that light – I want to say it feels merciful, endless, and as though the gods themselves have decided to linger. A thin place.

In the wool workshop, Paula Neves washes merino fleece from her black and white sheep in 65-degree water, the lanolin melts away to reveal a pure, cloudlike white. “Happy sheep make good wool,” Paula says, her hands moving with practised tenderness. Nearby, a group of men rehearse cante alentejano – the region’s soulful, polyphonic song. It’s a raw sound that vibrates somewhere between lament and prayer, a resonant echo of the land.

Come the evening, Barrocal glows like a lantern. The rooms and cottages – 40 in all, alongside the main farm buildings – emit a soft luminescence, their interiors stripped back to essentials: clay floors, linen drapes, the scent of olive oil soap. The architecture, while elementally simple, even humble, has a permanence, and converses with the land and its history, with the wisdom that beauty has no need of announcing itself.

“Every place has culture,” says José António, “but you have to dig deep to find it.” And here, he has unearthed not just culture, but a continuity that makes it a star inclusion in The Leading Hotels of the World book: Culture.

In a world obsessed with speed, Barrocal insists on slowness. I listen to the bees in the lavender, to the clop of hooves on cobblestones, to my breath syncing with the slow heartbeat of the Alentejo. It reminds me that craftsmanship is not only about making things well, but about making meaning – that true art lies in the relationship between the maker, the material, and the moment. Perhaps that’s what makes Alentejo so quietly powerful: it is both a place and a practice. A living, breathing expression of care – for the land, for heritage, for the kind of beauty that endures not in perfection but in purpose.

As I leave, the sky seems to widen, the road unspooling in a solar mirage, golden, and unassignable. Somewhere behind, the breeze threads its way through olive trees and terracotta tiles. And though I’m going, a part of me stays – woven into the slow, generous weave of Barrocal itself.