COMPORTA

Comporta is a rice-growing village. That is the first surprise: an hour south of Lisbon, behind the dunes, the land flattens into paddy fields worked since the nineteenth century, and white storks nest on every available post.

The beach beyond is Atlantic and enormous — kilometres of pale sand backed by umbrella pines, with no hotels on it because the whole estate was held by a single family for decades and simply never sold. What development exists is low, wooden and painted in the blue and white of the old fishermen's huts.

So this is the quiet one. The palette is muted where the rest of the collection is saturated, the light is hazy Atlantic rather than hard Mediterranean, and nothing in the frame is trying to impress anyone. Comporta is a freguesia of Alcácer do Sal, and it would rather you did not tell too many people.