“Someone has left a single flip-flop on the roundabout median, sole-up, like a sundial tracking nothing.”

The taxi from Faro takes about an hour if the driver doesn't stop for coffee, which mine does, at a petrol station near Albufeira where the espresso costs seventy cents and comes in a cup the size of a thimble. By the time we reach the eastern outskirts of Lagos, the landscape has loosened — scrubby hills giving way to flat marshland, then the wide, pale sweep of Meia Praia appearing on the left like someone unrolling a bolt of linen. The road runs parallel to the beach for a good stretch before the hotel appears, a low-rise block set back from the sand, the kind of building that doesn't announce itself so much as wait for you to notice it.

Lagos proper — the old town with its cobbled lanes, its fish restaurants, its fort overlooking the marina — sits about two kilometres to the west. You can walk it along the beachfront promenade in twenty-five minutes, or catch the local train from the Meia Praia halt, which is roughly a ten-minute walk from the hotel. The train runs to Lagos station every half hour or so during the day, and costs under two euros. Most people walk. The promenade is flat, the light is good, and there's a chiringuito halfway along where you can stop for a Sagres and watch kitesurfers crash into the shallows with admirable persistence.

The room, the pool, the morning

Dom Pedro Lagos is a resort in the classic Algarve sense — pool at the centre, rooms fanning out around it, buffet breakfast, terracotta tones. It doesn't try to be a boutique hotel or a design statement. It tries to be the place you come back to after a day on the beach, sand still in your hair, and find a clean towel and a functioning shower. It mostly succeeds.

The rooms are spacious in the way that mid-range Portuguese hotels often are — generous square footage, a proper balcony, furniture that's been updated recently enough to not depress you. Mine faces the pool, which means I wake to the sound of someone doing determined laps at seven in the morning. The bed is firm. The air conditioning works with conviction. The bathroom has that particular hotel trait where the shower glass only covers half the tub, so by the third morning you've developed a technique involving strategic elbow placement and a willingness to mop the floor with a bath mat.

What the hotel gets right is proximity. Meia Praia is one of the longest beaches in the Algarve — four kilometres of sand that never feels crowded, even in July, because there's simply too much of it. The hotel sits close enough that you can be barefoot on the beach in five minutes. This changes the rhythm of a stay entirely. You don't plan a beach day. You just go. Before breakfast, after lunch, at sunset when the sand turns copper and the fishermen start pulling boats up past the waterline.

“Meia Praia doesn't reward the postcard-hunter — it rewards the person willing to walk far enough along the sand that the town disappears behind them.”

The breakfast buffet is solid without being memorable — good pastéis de nata, decent coffee, a fruit selection that rotates. One morning I watch a man at the next table build an elaborate tower of bread rolls, butter each one with surgical precision, and eat them while reading a Portuguese newspaper with the intensity of someone defusing a bomb. Nobody bothers him. The staff here have the relaxed professionalism of people who've worked resort hospitality long enough to know that guests are at their strangest before ten in the morning.

For dinner, skip the hotel and walk into Lagos. Restaurante dos Artistas on Rua Cândido dos Reis does a grilled sea bass that's worth the twenty-five-minute stroll. Or stay beachside and eat at one of the Meia Praia seafood shacks — O Camilo and Meia Praia Beach Restaurant both serve cataplana, the copper-pot fish stew that's the Algarve's answer to bouillabaisse, except nobody argues about what goes in it. Whatever came off the boat. Some tomato. Done.

The pool area fills up by mid-morning and empties by four, when everyone migrates to the beach for the golden hours. There's a small gym that smells faintly of chlorine and ambition. The Wi-Fi holds steady in the rooms but gets patchy by the pool — which might be a design flaw or might be the kindest thing the hotel does for you. I choose to believe the latter.

Walking out

On the last morning I walk east along Meia Praia instead of west toward town. The beach stretches on past the point where the promenade ends and the dunes take over. There are fewer people out here — a jogger, a woman throwing a ball for a dog that has no interest in returning it, a couple of fishermen standing in the shallows with hand lines. The Ria de Alvor glimmers in the distance. I'd walked this beach three times already and somehow hadn't turned this direction.

If you're catching the train back to Faro, the Meia Praia halt has no ticket machine — buy your ticket on board or at Lagos station beforehand. The 9:47 gets you to the airport with time to spare for a last espresso in a thimble-sized cup.

Doubles at Dom Pedro Lagos start around $139 in shoulder season, climbing past $232 in July and August — the price of a room that puts four kilometres of uncrowded sand within barefoot range and lets you decide, every morning, whether today is a town day or a beach day or both.