A miracle of design: Faro, the Palm Springs of Portugal

09.10.2023 - 16:25 / theguardian.com

In the glare of the morning sun, the streets of downtown Faro are a textural hot mess. A faded art deco shopfront sits cheek by crumbling jowl with its neighbour’s rusting balustrades and handmade fondant tiles. A bank swerves around the corner like an ice-cream sandwich hit by pistachio light. Everywhere there are buildings you might generously describe as less art and more nouveau. These are layers of the near past – and I’m smitten.

But in this overlooked city, crowded with dusty anomalies, it is the modernist architecture – strict, sharp, punctuated by flat roofs and sloping angles – that attracts the most attention. Faro has more than 500 of these mid-century buildings, the highest concentration in southern Europe. Perversely, it’s only now that the curious are taking note. From looming, Rio-style high-rises clad in geometric scallops to modernist villas, the structural clarity and sheer chutzpah they share are catnip for the modern enthusiast.

In the early 1950s, having made their money in South America, a group of Portuguese architects led by Algarvian Manuel Gomes da Costa returned home ready to confront political values and reject outmoded ideas. Inspired by the work of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Oscar Niemeyer, they were tasked with breathing new life into the region, and in that sense their take on modernism – the “South Modern” style – did much to address Faro’s lack of character.

For easy reference, and it’s a bit of a push, you could call it the Palm Springs of Portugal, although the buildings here retain an undeniably unique flavour. Gomes da Costa is known for a style of tropical futurism that pitted nature against the elements in truly progressive ways. His Brazilian-inspired cobogós are latticed slabs of brutal concrete, designed to cool a facade and filter light into shadowy abstraction. Everything he created celebrates the sun in some shape or form, so it’s slightly ironic that they’re now drawing people off the beaches and on to the streets.

On Rua Dom Francisco Gomes sits The Modernist hotel (doubles from €150, minimum two nights), a former maritime office reconfigured into guest apartments, for those who don’t mind being labelled “archi-tourists”. Like a chest of drawers, neatly positioned above a lottery kiosk, this symmetrical paean to a time gone by (once described as “the ugliest building in Faro”) is an ugly duckling grown up. There are no TVs here, no art on the walls. Just local green marble, red vinyl floors and the bed you wish you had at home. The Modernist is no-frills luxe, if such a term exists. It’s all about the lines.

Owners Christophe and Angelique are Parisians who came four years ago and never left. “Faro is a miracle of design and architecture,”