Comporta: A (not so) well-kept secret

Ask anybody what fascinates them about Comporta and the answer will also be different, but there arewords that describe it. Simple, enigmatic, quasivirgin nature, comforting. The international elite seem to rediscover it each summer, giving it a reputationas the cool place to be, a hidden destination that brings artists and jet setters together, the epitome of luxury. Phoebe Philo, the iconic creative director at Céline, said that the chicest thing in the world is when you don't exist on Google – Comporta has gone beyond that phase, but the cloud over this paradise is still the same one that gave it a place in the sun. After all, it was and is a place that people discovered through the like-minded. Comporta went through peculiar days that revolutionized its peaceful routine on the shoresof an Atlantic that breaks along kilometers of dunes: long story short, the history of its coolness begins around the 1980s, when Pedro Espírito Santos and his cousins started buying and renting fishermen's huts that were on the family property, Herdade da Comporta, and bringing their international friends to visit, well-known names from the world of art, film,the aristocracy and business. Comporta is now a walk of fame, with regulars like pop star Madonna, Belgian designer Vincent Van Duysen, actress Julianne Moore and fashion designer Christian Louboutin, but its local stars are dazzling too, like Nuno Carvalho, a builder of cabanas that make you want to move house, Sílvia Rosa, a chef with a handful of seasoning from Retirodo Pescador, Júlio Maria, master of antiques and big little treasures, depending on how you look at them, and Carlos Gomes, who built an empire through the Gomes minimarket. The symbiosis that comes from outside and the natural resistance to change are the yin and yang that gave it an identity of its own, one that sets it apart from other similar parts of the country and makes it genuine.

Shops and luxury hotels go hand in hand with people’s homes with garden gnomes at the entrance. There is still more than enough room for the future to arrive, but history (always cyclical) shows us that Comporta was always one step ahead. Men and women toiling in rice fields from sunrise to sunset. There were no roads, the pathways were dust and dusty and instead of houses, there were thatched reed cabanas. This was in the 1950s, shortly after Herdade da Comporta was bought by the Espírito Santo family from the English Atlantic Company, which had owned the land for almost three decades, since 1925. The land was made fertile, marshland was transformed into rice fields, granaries, workshops, a canteen, bakery and school were built, pine trees were planted (up to the 1920s, Comporta consisted of barren sands and uncultivated marshland, earning it the name ‘Metropolitan Africa’). At that time – much like today – Comporta was an isolated world, like an island that acted as a society on a small scale, with a hierarchy based on social stratification, as Ana Duarte, a researcher at the Rice Museum, described it. Life was hard and slow, but the symbiosis brought benefits here: both at the time of the ‘English’ and at the time of the Espírito Santo family, people knew about everything modern (the people living in this microsystem had access to the cinema, they watched artists perform at the São João festivities). It’s a bit like what Saramago wrote – sometimes you have to leave the island to see the island. You can't see yourself if you don’t leave yourself, and if there's one unfathomable characteristic, it’s that you can still go to Comporta and forget about everything. The magnificence of finding a place like this is that there's no starting point, there's no journey, no goal – the very existence of Comporta is enough, unlike almost all modern conveniences, it's enough and more.

Any guide or roadmap will always be lacking. You can't print the perfume of the pine trees, nor the sensation of diving into icy water. The diverse landscape is all around – beaches, dunes, marshland, woods, salt flats, rice fields and peat bogs, the universe was inspired the day it created Comporta. It's so pleasant that birds choose to land there rather than flying away, with over 200 species making it their home. The sea is as rich as the rest, home to molluscs and crustaceans, seabream and bottlenose dolphins (the only community in the country). That’s it: Comporta is unpredictable and maybe that’s the word we’ve been looking for all this time. So much of a chameleon that you can go there once and it will be like an abandoned cinema set, then go back and find a lively buzz around a bar or gallery. But comparisons are inevitable. Saint-Tropez in the 1970s. Ibiza in the 1980s. The Hamptons in the 1990s.

Different from all of them, Comporta has been an easy target for comparison – that thing we have of likening places where we’ve been happy with the memories we know will remain forever untouched, encapsulated in a space and time when everything was set in motion with the first push. But no, Comporta is not like anything you’ve ever seen. Not like Montauk, Tarida, Trancoso or Formentera, or any other resort in the world – and, to be honest, often not even like itself.

It is in its repetitive metamorphosis, its heightened curiosity, its evident beauty and in that light that not everybody can reach that it remains forever young, keeping the most closely guarded secret in Europe.