Dear Editor,
I was commenting the other week about how the Algarve never seems to get a mention in the travel pages of UK newspapers.
Every country with a tourist industry is mentioned, but the Algarve always seems to get forgotten about.
So imagine my surprise, today, on opening The Sunday Times, to see an article on the Algarve! But my expectations were short lived on reading the first paragraph.
For those of you who missed it, here is the opening paragraph: “The Algarve does not have a good reputation. The coast is liberally sprinkled with tower block hotels, lager, chips and slightly scary children called Lee. Any bits in between have been made into golf courses. You wouldn’t want to go within a hundred miles, would you?”
Charming huh? The second paragraph slightly redeems itself by extolling the beauty of the west coast. But is this what the Algarve has become? The laughing stock of Europe?
Like everywhere else, the Algarve has suffered from the recession and a strong Euro (or a weak Pound if you prefer) and, yes, the Algarve has been very slow to react to this.
Hotels and golf courses, and every other business, have been unwilling to adjust their prices to attract more customers in this era of austerity.
But what I question most is what is the Portuguese and Algarve tourism boards doing about it? I think ‘nothing’ has to be the answer.
You see the Douro, Lisbon, Madeira and even the Azores getting plenty of promotion, but what about the Algarve?
In the 70s, the Algarve was promoted as Europe’s hidden gem and what a response that had.
We quickly became Europe’s unhidden gem and tourism took off. Today, the region is almost 100% reliant on the money tourism brings here.
Everybody has benefitted by the money it brings, whether you are a developer building tower blocks or hotels or the ladies sitting by the side of the road selling bags of oranges.
This generation of politicians and government workers have been seduced by the benefits of mass tourism.
They seem to have forgotten, or been too young to remember, a time when figs, almonds and oranges were the region’s main source of income, when a car was a rare sight and mule and cart were the main means of transport.
It has been taken for granted that the tourists will arrive every summer and everything is just fine. Well it’s not.
And this article is one more nail in the Algarve’s demise, or am I being too gloomy? I hope so!
But this article by someone called Steven Bleach is an insult to all of us who worked in all our small ways to make the this Europe’s most beautiful coast a place where people will come and have the best holiday of their lives here.
So, what ARE the tourism boards going to do about it? Complacency is not an option any more.
Pete Deasington
by email
