Apartments in Quarteira Line the Promenade

The high-rise apartments in Quarteira which are set back from the beautiful palm tree-lined promenade that stretches along the Portugese oceanfront are a top vacation destination for European and Portugese vacationers alike. The promenade with its cultivated rows of palms gives Quarteira its unique southern Portugaese flavour.

Located along a beautiful and appealing stretch of honey-coloured sand beach on the Algarve coast, Quarteira was an ancient yet modest fishing village until modern times. Like many other remote and quiet fishing villages that have turned into some of the world's most popular tourist destinations - think, Acapulco in Mexico, which was a quiet backwater fishing village, until it was discovered and popularized by Hollwood actors and directors looking for a quick escape from the frenetic pace of their work-a-day world - Quarteira' s sense of time and place is governed by its relationship to the sea.

First settled in early Roman times by intrepid seafarers that sailed past the "Pillars of Hercules" at Gibraltar and rounded the Iberian peninsula to venture up what is now the Portugese coast, the swath of placid beach must have been a welcome sight when compared to the alternating cliffs and narrow sand beach inlets of the Algarve coast - a site from which these most maritime of ancient peoples would launch the fishing fleets that would sustain them and their descendants for the next thousands of years.

It is this broad stretch of beach itself- equally suited for bathing, sunbathing, boating or watersports as well traditional fishing - that now draws tourists from all over Portugal and the rest of Europe to Quarteira, its beaches, restaurants and nightlife, and the rental apartments in Quarteria which line the city's promenade along the sea.

Algarve Apartments and Villas Provide a Vista to Portugal's Moorish Past

The morning breeze that wafts across the verandaed portico of an Algarve apartment is the same wind that swept the cliffs and sand beaches of Portugal's Atlantic coast and through the Algarve's orange groves and almond trees when the Saracens first settled this southernmost of Portugal's many-splendoured regions some 800-plus years ago. Traces of the the Algarve's enduring Moorish influence are still found in the architecture of both the modern Algarve apartments and villa rentals that house visitors drawn south by the Algarve's beaches, as well as in the traditional whitewashed homes that still line the village streets of the Algarve's timeless heartland.

Eight hundred years ago, the Algarve's remote, southern locale dictated it was the last area of Portugal to come under Moorish rule. Today, the Algarve with its its unique climate and topography remains remote but only in perceptions of time and culture. In terms of accessibility, an Algarve apartment or villla rental is perhaps the surest way to retreat from the rushed pace of modern times and embrace the leisures and natural splendours of Portugal's fabled past, while sacrificing none of Europe's modern conveniences.