September, like most months of the year these days, has forgotten its place in the calendar. From the shade of the garden overlooking the bay, Praia da Luz – on the south coast of Portugal – lies below in the fierce, crystalline light of an afternoon that belongs more naturally to the height of summer.
The temperature has climbed into the low thirties again and the sun seems determined to hold its position, pressing down upon the bay with an almost physical weight. Nothing in the scene suggests summer is preparing to leave.
The garden terrace offers sanctuary. Great palms throw ragged shadows across the stone paths, filtering the sunlight into moving fragments. Pines and a gnarled cork tree lean towards the sea, the latter’s trunk dark and contorted, while succulents and cacti rise from the dry earth with the smug resilience of plants that long ago learned not to expect rain. Beneath them, the ground is dusty, baked hard after another long Algarve summer.
Beyond this shaded oasis is the brightness of the beach, a luminous, picture-perfect arch of sand and sea. Praia da Luz is busy without achieving the indignity of being crowded. Bronzed figures, reduced by distance and heat to anonymous specimens of leisure, wander slowly along the water’s edge while others grill in the rays of the overbearing sun.
Umbrellas provide splashes of colour and the largely theoretical promise of shade. A few young children jump and splash in the water supervised by their parents. The Atlantic, so often restless, has been subdued into a sheet of serene blue and green, barely distinguishable at the horizon from the bleached sky above it.
My view is not the airbrushed Algarve of the holiday brochure but the lived-in daily rhythm of the coast: beautiful, untidy, functional.
Everything seems slowed by the heat, even the practical paraphernalia of resort life: cafés adorning the cobbled promenade dispensing lunch and cold drinks, giant inflatables on the beach awaiting temporary ownership, jet skis bobbing offshore with the neglected air of expensive toys nobody can be bothered to use.
To the east, the land rises abruptly, the great ochre and rust-coloured cliffs providing a reminder that this gentle bay has been carved in harsher times. Villas and apartments climb the opposite slope in white terraces, the inevitable southern European accretion of concrete, balconies and aspirational sea views, their walls dazzling in the afternoon glare.
And yet there is something slightly disconcerting about the perfection of it all. It is mid-September. The afternoon shadows are beginning to lengthen and evenings arrive earlier. Somewhere in the instincts of generations is the expectation that summer should be loosening its grip. But the thermometer says otherwise. Another day in the thirties. Another afternoon when the air barely moves and shade becomes valuable territory.
Perhaps that is what gives the view its peculiar intensity: the collision between beauty and unease. Paradise is still paradise. It has merely developed a temperature problem.
From beneath the trees, however, such thoughts are all too easily postponed. The sea glitters. Beachgoers continue their slow migration between sand and water. A palm frond stirs briefly. And the first month of autumn carries on pretending to be August.
