Tivoli Almansor - Carvoeiro, Portugal     

The hotel is in a great location and the view is definitely one we will remember. Be brave enough to go down the steps (and ladder!) that lead to the beach and spend some time there as it is absolutely fantastic. Unfortunately, the hotel interiors look a bit shabby. Carpets and wood finishing everywhere would suit better a pub than a Southern European hotel. The hotel is a bit overpriced and the clientele tends to be a bit boorish (The Sun is the most read paper by the swimming pool).

I searched for weeks to find the right place. We wanted an affordable package tour. (I’d long ago made my peace with that.) But where would it be? Spain? Turkey? And we wanted a fairly decent hotel that was on the right side of the classy/tacky divide. While searching the options, I kept coming back to this place. Right from the beginning I had a feeling about it. Looked nice in the pictures. Affordable. The only downside I thought was….the Algarve. Do we really want to go there? And would the water be warm enough in June? I kept coming back to look at that picture of the cliffside hotel and the little beach and the cave. Something about the location intrigued me. So I booked it. We weren’t disappointed. The impression of the hotel on entry is a good one. None of that holiday let-down feeling. Like most of the other satisfied posters here, we had a seaview room. When I say sea view, I mean one of the most spectacular sea views you can imagine. And you can hear the waves. ( I can’t imagine staying at this hotel on the other side. Please don’t do it because you’ll miss the whole point of this hotel. ) We thought the room itself was fine. The furniture and room size was fine, like at any decent hotel. Some posters described the furnishings as tired, but that was not our impression. We knew immediately we could spend a week there. The air conditioning was good. Water pressure fine. Nice big windows and balcony. There was also a selection of about 8 English television stations. Unusually, there were even a few that were not news stations and showed movies and so on. No having to watch the Simpsons in Spanish or German. There were no Dutch stations though. Maybe the management will think of getting BVN.... Our room was on the top floor. These top floor rooms have a cement balcony wall. This means that you can’t sit on the balcony (or lie in your bed) and look at the sea view. On the other hand, we had much more balcony privacy than the rooms on the lower floors. The balcony walls on the lower floor rooms were see-through. This hotel is big and has the feel of a nice resort, but it’s not huge. The building is in a V-shape focused on the sea. The bar is located in the centre and they play music most evenings until about 11 or so I think. So this means that you can hear the music from every room. It didn’t disturb us though -- and this is the kind of thing that ordinarily would. The breakfasts were pleasant enough. Yogurt, fruit, eggs (in several way), omelettes, cereal, cold cuts, selection of breads, etc. It seemed oriented to British and northern European taste. Don’t expect salmon, caviar, luxury jam, and so on. The machine-served coffee was just OK. They didn’t have hagelslag or other Dutch breakfast specialties. You don’t need to book half pension here. If you do decide to eat at the restaurant it’s ?20 pp for the buffet. We also ate at the poolside restaurant a few times. It’s OK although not cheap. The bar there has a balcony with a great view. The pool is nice, but perhaps a too small for this hotel. The deckchairs are spread out nicely around the pool and the surrounding grounds. We had to scramble only once to find a functioning umbrella. They’re going to need to think soon about fixing the “dead” umbrellas in the store room or buy more. There was a contingent of children there, and activities for them, but I wouldn’t say this was specifically a family hotel. There were quite a few older couples, but nor was it an OAP resort. There was a mix of people. Most of the guests at this hotel seemed British, Irish, German, Portuguese and a wide variety of other western Europeans. One of us stayed mostly by the pool, but there’s a stairway to this little cove at the bottom cliff. At low tide I went down every day. Unless you’ve got serious mobility problems or laziness issues, it’s no problem getting down to the beach. It's quite nice despite being small and at the foot of a huge hotel. The water is cool in June (too cold for some to go swimming), but by the end of the week I was swimming for hours. I don't know if the water warmed up or if I had got used to it. The whole hotel is situated in a hollow with huge cliff walls on the left and right. These cliffs are an enormous bird city. If you enjoy birdwatching, you’ll have plenty to see. The conveniently located diving club at this hotel does shore dives from the little beach at the bottom of the stairs. They have an indoor wellness area with a small pool and a small sauna. The gym is a small room with a stairmaster, rowing machine, treadmill and stationary bicycle. A few benches and dumbbells going up to 22 kg. As much as we enjoyed this hotel, the inadequacy of the gym was an issue for us because that was one reason why we picked it.. Oh well. Once we hired a car we found the gym at the Tennis Club on the other side of town to be perfect. Getting there on foot would have been a pain though. The hotel is not in Carvoeiro but it’s close enough – perhaps about 1 km or so. You don’t really need a car or a taxi. The uphill gradient is not steep but steep enough to make you wish you didn’t have to do it. Older people and prams were handling it. There are bars and restaurants only a few hundred metres away from the hotel so you don’t have to do this climb if you don’t feel like it. There's a grocery store a few hundreds metres from the hotel. We thought Carvoeiro was a good town to be based at. The beach and plaza in the centre provide a nice focus and some colour. How much of charming Portugal is left here is a matter of debate. Not much. It felt like a tourist resort town. It’s small and not a party kind of place. There were plenty of restaurants. We had a few memorable dining experiences. They all seemed to charge around ?20 and serve the same kind of food, although we found a few cheaper options. At some places you can eat almost on the beach or on the cliff edge. The rest of the surrounding area has been given over to upscale housing and holiday developments. It’s not overwhelming and it’s not at all a tacky high-rise kind of development. There’s very little of old Portugal in this area. If you want that, you have to drive up to Silves, which has an interesting old fort. This hotel is within fairly easy walking distance of a mildly interesting tourist feature called Algar Seco, the beach in Carvoeiro and a beach called Praia de Centianes. There are other beaches nearby – either by car or a long walk. Perhaps the nicest in our view was Praia da Marinha. This is actually close to being a world-class little cove beach. You can swim to caves from here if you’re careful. I have to admit that these Algarve beaches have won me over. They are spectacular. I was wrong to doubt the Algarve. At one beach (Praia de Gaia) the shells were rolling out of the water at your feet. How often do you see that? And of course there was the rest of the Algarve to explore.We ended up hiring a car for a few days and exploring around. It’s not necessary to do this though. I think you could easily stay at this hotel for a whole week without hiring a car. In a word: a perfectly enjoyable holiday resort for one and all. This is a trouble-free, well-run hotel that gets it right. The Portuguese people we met at the hotel and elsewhere were all great. Go. You'll have a good week.