"Portugal - Too hot for golf, perfect for kids"

Sarah Vine writing for The Times travelled with Powder Byrne to Penha Longa in Portugal where prices during the summer start from £1,647 per adult and £621 per child, based on a family of four sharing a suite on a B&B basis, including flights and transfers.  Crèche prices are £190-£310 per child per week.  May half-term prices are higher, from £1,992 per adult and £725 per child.

 

"Think your budget won’t stretch to a sunny holiday in high season?  It will if you choose this golf resort, says Sarah Vine.

When it comes to summer holidays the travel operators have got parents of school-aged children over a barrel – and don’t they know it?  Finding somewhere sunny to relax in August has become so prohibitively expensive that in recent years we have decided not to bother.  My children are now staycation veterans, having visited almost every cave formation and windswept beach that this island has to offer.  For them, summer holidays are synonymous with wellies, wetsuits and soggy sausages on the beach.

The trouble is that sometimes you just need a bit of sun; some warmth in the bones.  And while I yield to no one in my admiration for the great sweeping landscapes of Scotland, or the melancholy charm of Wales, neither is especially good at being warm and sunny – or not reliably so anyway.  If you want guaranteed warm weather, you’ve got to head south.

Until last August, the nearest I had ever been to Portugal was a railway arch in West London: Auto Lisboa, home to my trusty mechanic Joe.  That, along with occasional Saturday morning pilgrimages to the Golborne Road for strong coffee and pastéis de natas was all I really knew about the country – except, of course, that a lot of golf happens there.  Golf is second only to darts on my list of incomprehensible sports, so when it was suggested that I might like to spend a week at the Penha Longa Spa and Golf Resort near Sintra, I began to feel that the chilly tides of Western Scotland might not be so bad.  Then they told me the good news: there would be no golf.

The problem, you see, is the weather.  It’s too hot for driving and putting in Portugal in August, so what operates lucratively the rest of the year as a premiere destination for golfing enthusiasts has to find another way of earning its keep in the scorching summer heat.  In other words, their low season is our high season.  During the months of July and August the hotel Penha Longa, set in beautiful countryside close to beaches, culture and Portugal’s charming capital city, Lisbon, lowers its prices from astronomic to just about affordable.  It is the perfect destination for a school summer holiday.  Mysteriously, given my tendency towards inertia, I seem to have bred two turbo-charged human beings.  Their idea of fun (tearing around at 90 miles an hour) does not, sadly, coincide with my idea of fun (sleeping, reading, staring aimlessly into space).  Thus holidays tend to involve me grumpily chasing the kids from activity to activity, wishing that they would stop for a minute so that I can have a drink and read my book.  Adult time doesn’t really come into it, unless you count a furtive glass of wine in the half hour between them finally falling asleep and me collapsing unconscious into bed.

Not so at Penha Longa.  Here, the staff at the Powder Byrne kids club do all the charging around for you – only with infinitely more skill and enthusiasm.  Their excellent club is run by people who are barely more than children themselves, which means that they have plenty of energy for riotous physical activity and fart jokes.  Whether you’re a new parent who wants a lie-in, or a working mother like me who longs to see her children but also needs to recharge her batteries, they’ll find a way to accommodate you.  They cater for all ages, from newborn to 14, and all swimming abilities, with plenty of tennis, windsurfing and outings thrown in.

On our first day, we dropped the children off at 10 o’clock and then returned to our room for a coffee (by the way, if you’re a Nespresso fan, it’s worth packing a few capsules in your case: the rooms have Nespresso machines, but they charge €3 a pop).  Then we sort of sat around, feeling a little disorientated (when you’re working parents of small children, free time is a novelty), before grabbing books and towels and doing what all pasty Brits do on their summer hols: head for the pool.

We soon discovered that this was not really an option: all the other weary mums and dads who had just dropped their kids off had had the same idea, only while we had been dawdling around in the room, they would beat us to it.  In a word, it was heaving.  We decided to try again later and take in some culture instead.

Sintra is a pretty hilltop town just a €10 (£8.50) taxi ride away.  It was made famous by Lord Byron, who raved about its “glorious Eden”.  Being high up, cool and richly verdant, it was the summer destination of Portuguese royalty, eager to escape the stifling heat of Lisbon.  As a result, it boasts some impressive architecture and has a beautiful air of faded glory about it.

The main square is home to the Palácio National de Sintra, an imposing white medieval building remarkable for its pristine condition, lavish decoration and elaborate tilework.  We spent a happy few hours wandering around its shady courtyards, before retiring for a late lunch and heading back to the hotel at 4pm to pick up the children.

The following day, having once again failed to stake our claim to a sunlounger (in truth, we weren’t really trying: neither of us is a sun-worshipper), we took the train from Cascais to Lisbon.  This turned out to be a dangerous decision since the shopping in Lisbon is some of the best I have ever experienced – and because the Portuguese have yet to succumb to the body fascism that plagues most of the rest of Europe, I found that I could fit into almost all of it.

As if that weren’t enough of an excitement, the place is also full of magnificent, old-fashioned bars and cafés, each one selling piles and piles of glistening pastéis de natas (which were invented in a monastery in the suburb of Belém, just outside Lisbon).  Two of these irresistible delicacies, washed down with coffee, provided my lunch, and the rest of the day was spent trying on dresses in Ana Salazar.  Bliss.

Meanwhile, back at Penha Longa, the children were indulging in all sorts of crazy fun of their own, including visits to the beach, the aquarium, discos, movie showings and sporting tournaments.  At the end of each day we convened to swim, shower, chat and generally get ready for dinner in one of the resort’s restaurants – excellent value if booked as part of a half-board package, a little expensive otherwise.

At the end of the week we were sad to say goodbye.  Portugal had provided our first truly relaxing holiday as parents and the children had learnt what it meant to go swimming without getting frostbite.  Best of all, we weren’t stony broke.  Or at least we wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t spent so much time in the shoe shop in Lisbon … "

By Sarah Vine
The Times - Saturday 19 February 2011