I’m used to cheap and cheerful Portugal — city breaks in Lisbon and Porto, beach weeks away from the grottier bits of the Algarve — and never thought of it as a high-end destination. Then I took up an offer from the self-described Portuguese enfant terrible of luxury, JNcQUOI, to spend 48 hours in Lisbon and Comporta, an exclusive and carefully nurtured district of white sand beaches, rice paddies and storks nesting in electricity pylons, 90 minutes south of the capital.
It was a weekend of sublime seafood, an on-call Range Rover and driver, and sunning and swimming from a lavish four-poster beach bed where minions proffered drinks, doughnuts and chilled cucumber slices to ease tired eyes. Then a stroll from the friskily azure sea up to JNcQUOI’s thatched and elegantly weathered Beach Club to drink the company’s own wines from Alentejo, survey the day’s spanking fresh catch and ponder Shark’s Drool, a sinful sugar hit of a pudding made from local rice and pine nuts.
