The Algarve has two halves of beach and almost everyone knows one: the honey-coloured cliffs, the small coves and the rock arches, west of Faro. It is photogenic, it is narrow and in summer it is packed.
The other half starts right at Faro and runs east. It has no cliffs and no coves: it has sixty kilometres of sand islands that no road reaches.
01 Sixty kilometres of sandbar
The system is called the Ria Formosa and it is a natural park of around 18,400 hectares. It consists of a shallow lagoon separated from the sea by a chain of five barrier islands and two peninsulas, running from the Ancão peninsula to Manta Rota.
The islands are Barreta, better known as Deserta, Culatra, Armona, Tavira and Cabanas. Between them and the mainland lies a sheet of salt water full of channels, sandbanks and marsh that empties and fills with every tide.
And the bar does not stay still. The bars migrate, the inlets open and close and the whole thing shifts slowly eastwards. It is a landform in motion, not a stage set.
02 Why the boat is not a whim
The practical consequence is simple and it is the reason for everything else: you do not drive to these beaches. There are regular ferries from Faro, from Olhão and from Fuseta, and that is the only way in.
A boat is not a car park. It has a number of places and a timetable, so the island's capacity is set by the transport and not by the size of the sand. The result, on a coast as busy as this one, is a wide beach with few people.
The counterpart lies in the same fact. The last boat is the last, and whoever misses it is stranded on an island with no car, in most cases no hotel and sometimes no service beyond one restaurant.
The capacity of these beaches is not set by the car park: it is set by the number of seats on the boat.
03 Which island to choose
The choice matters more than it seems, because the islands do not offer the same thing. Deserta is the emptiest: it has no inhabitants and barely any services, and the beach is enormous. It is the option for anyone who wants sand and nothing else.
Culatra and Armona do have permanent populations, with clusters of low houses, a restaurant or two and a life of their own that does not depend on visitors. They are the islands for anyone who wants to see how the place works and not only lie down.
And there is a physical difference worth knowing before stepping off the boat: each island has two shores. The lagoon side is still, shallow and warmer water; the sea side is the open beach, with swell and water at Atlantic temperature.
Crossing from one to the other takes a few minutes on a wooden boardwalk over the dune. Many visitors stay on the first shore they see without knowing there is another.
04 A lagoon that also works
What sets this place apart from any old sandbar is that the lagoon is not empty: it is a working operation. The banks exposed at low tide are clam beds, divided into concessions worked by hand.
The scale is surprising: the Ria Formosa produces around half of all Portugal's clams, with some 3,200 tonnes in 2018. To that are added oysters, which have been gaining ground in recent years, and the salt pans that occupy the mainland shore.
For the visitor that changes what you see from the boat. The figures bent over the mud at low tide are not bathers: it is the lagoon's working shift, and it runs on the tide calendar, not the summer one.
05 What you have to accept
The first limitation is the timetable. Out of high season the boats thin out, and there are islands with only a few departures a day. Check the return time before you check the outbound one.
The second is the lack of shelter. The bar is completely flat with neither cliff nor trees, so with a westerly wind there is no sheltered corner. Nor is there shade beyond what you bring.
And the third is one of expectation. Anyone arriving in search of the rock formations of the Algarve postcards will not find them here: those are west of Faro and they are another trip. Here there is sand, dune, shallow water and horizon.
06 How to build the trip
Four to seven days is enough to do it properly: sleep on the mainland, in Faro, Olhão or Tavira, and go out to a different island each day. All three towns have a landing in the centre, so no car is needed.
The month is decided by the combination of water and people. September is the best: 21.5 millimetres of rain over 1.9 days, highs of 26.4 degrees and the water still holding summer's accumulated warmth, around the 21.7 degrees it reaches in August.
And it pays to check the tide table before each trip. At low tide enormous banks appear that you can walk across and where you see the shellfishing at work; at high tide the lagoon is one continuous sheet and the sea-side beach narrows. They are not the same thing.
What makes this trip different is not the beach, which is sand like any other. It is the barrier to entry: on a coast where you park ten metres from the water, here you have to get on a boat, and that alone is enough for the beach to look like what it used to be.
