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Algarve history

The Algarve is Portugal's most popular tourist region, with beautiful beaches and gorgeous coves, bathed by the warmth of the Gulf Stream. In addition, it has good hotels, charming resorts, first-class golf courses and splendid food.

The Algarve region occupies 5,412 square kilometres in the south of Portugal, and has about 350,000 permanent residents. This population rises to over a million in the summer, as tourists are drawn by the region's often spectacular beaches and warm waters and its Mediterranean climate.

Algarve History: There were Phoenician trading ports in the Algarve three thousand years ago, and the Carthaginians founded Portus Hanibalis, modern Portimao, in the sixth century BC. The Roman occupation of the Iberian Peninsula in the second century BC took in the Algarve, and there are important Roman remains in Lagos.

The Visigoths took the area in the fifth century, being expelled by the Moors in 716. It was the latter who named the region Al-Gharb, the country of the west, and they occupied it for longer than any other part of Portugal.

Alfonso III finally took the Algarve from the Moors in 1250 (so completing the reconquest of Portugal). In the fifteenth century, Henry the Navigator used the Algarve as the jumping-off point for the voyages of discovery which laid the foundations of the Portuguese Empire.

He established an important school of navigation at Sagres, and made Lagos a ship-building centre. But the Portuguese capital was in Lisbon, to which most of the colonial wealth went, and the Algarve entered a period of economic decline.

The great earthquake of 1755 which destroyed much of Lisbon hit the Algarve hard as well, and the subsequent reconstruction left many of its towns with a distinctive, rationalist architectural style. Nothing would have such a sweeping effect on the region until the tourist boom of the nineteen sixties and seventies.