Northern Alentejo in Its Own Classic

Five nights through the Northern Alentejo, self-guided, in the guest’s own classic car.

The frontier is the thread. This part of Portugal spent centuries contested, and the result is a landscape of fortified towns and castles spaced out along the border, several of them barely altered since.

Alcacer do Sal opens it, then Evora, a world heritage city with its Roman temple, its cathedral and its walls. The route then runs east through the historic towns of the Northern Alentejo across hilly country of cork oak forest and olive groves, the cork being stripped from the trees every nine years and the bare red trunks a feature of the landscape. Vila Vicosa comes next in the fortified border region, where the Dukes of Braganca kept their palace before they became kings, with the border fortresses scattered through the country around it.

The accommodation and the group meals are included; the car and getting it to the start are not, and the operator asks that it be comparable in age and power to its own MGA Roadsters, which is a sensible condition on a tour that travels as a group. The price shown is per person. Spring and autumn are the seasons, since the Alentejo in high summer is punishing. Six days at this price makes it the cheapest tour in the range, which is what supplying your own car buys, and the roads out here are empty enough to suit an older machine. The group dinners and the shared route mean the trip still has the shape of an organised tour rather than a set of hotel bookings, which is what separates it from simply driving down with a map.