Salgados Palm Village Apartments & Suites ★★★★

When you arrive at Salgados Palm Village Apartments & Suites, your first impression is that there is water everywhere. There are outdoor swimming pools, large, small, round and rectangular, dotted around amongst the lawns and palm trees. It really does look like a paradise for families, with four pools especially for children, and a range of pool bars, a games bar for children and outdoor bars for parents to lounge with a drink or a book on the sun loungers, with rolled towels invitingly ready for use. There is a decking path that leads down to the beach, and lawns where you can stroll or sit in the shade of the elegant palm trees whispering in the breeze. I could see we were all going to be spoilt for choice.

The reception staff are professional and helpful, with a particular welcome for the children, and we were soon settled in our apartments. My niece and family had a two-bedroom apartment and mine was one bedroom. They were both large and spotlessly clean with comfortable bedrooms. The living rooms had sofas and armchairs and workspace for relaxing or browsing catalogues of attractions – not that we felt inclined to put ourselves to the effort of actually leaving, at least not very much. We were here to relax and do nothing! It turned out that it would have been hard to tear the children away from their pools and kids’ activities in any case. We had a nice big balcony too for relaxing in the fresh air in the privacy of our own place. As well as the armchairs and sofas we had a nice dining room space with tables and chairs – plenty of room for the family to gather round for coffee, lunchtime nibbles or simply chilling and chatting, as you can only do when everything else is taken care of by somebody else.

When we took ourselves and the children out for a look around, we found the little footpath, decked and with railings, leading down to the beach and the endless blue of the Atlantic, kinder and warmer than at home, on the beautiful Algarve coast. These really must be some of the best beaches in Europe, with endless white sand and the turquoise and deep aquamarine blue that normally you associate with the Mediterranean. The kids were immediately in sand-castle construction mode; I don’t think they had seen such a huge expanse of sand in their whole lives.

We spent some lovely sunny days in the pools and on the beach, and in the evenings we had a choice of three restaurants, each with a different type of food. One day while I stayed ‘home’ with the children, their parents went for a long walk around the Salgados Lagoon, and were thrilled with the wildlife they had spotted, such as the Greater Flamingo, the Black-winged Stilt and the Ferruginous Duck; the reserve is the only place where they nest in the whole of Portugal.

By the end of our stay we were a family of happy children, happy aunt, and parents who were rested, relaxed and revived from their holiday at the Salgados Palm Village.