It’s after sunset on the outskirts of Melides, a tiny, sleepy town nestled in the unspoilt coastline of Alentejo in Portugal. While the wild Atlantic roars in the background, a cacophony of ribbiting frogs fills the air. It’s dark. And Christian Louboutin, the legendary footwear designer of red sole fame, is flashing his iPhone torch as we ramble off-piste through dry, prickly scrubland on the banks of the Melides lagoon. I’ll be honest: when someone mentioned the words ‘Christian Louboutin’ and ‘new hotel’, this whole off-roading, frogs-in-the-dark situation wasn’t exactly what leapt to mind. But in fact, it perfectly sums up what Louboutin most wants to share about his piece of Portuguese pa radise, a nd it isn’t Instagrammable shots of cocktails and white linen bed sheets but rather raw, unplanned, immersive — albeit frog-infested — moments like this.
If you haven’t heard of Melides before, that’s exactly the point. Louboutin moved to this ancient fishing town 10 years ago from its buzzier neighbour, Comporta, 20 minutes’ drive north, where he bought a place long before the digital nomads, George Clooney and Madonna moved in. ‘I love the landscape, the sea, the beach,’ he says, as we chat by the open fire in the bar of his new hotel, Vermelho, which opened at the beginning of April. ‘But then it became like a colony of people building houses. I had the feeling that the landscape was becoming destroyed and suddenly people were asking me to come for lunch, come for dinner.’ The tipping point? ‘Comporta doesn’t have a church. In Portugal you don’t have a town without a church. It means this is a place where people are working and holidaying, but not living.’
