Arneiro de Valverde - Nature & Magical Sunset

This is a house with a cozy shady garden, a hammock, sun loungers, a fireplace, and floor-to-ceiling windows. You can lie in bed and watch the sun set directly into the ocean. By car, it took us about 10 minutes to get to the Alentejo coast: many beaches with white sand, the Atlantic Ocean, and almost no people. You feel as if you have your own private beach. It is a wonderful place for swimming. The supermarket and cafés are in Porto Covo, in the same area as the beaches, about 10 minutes away by car. The house has everything you need for cooking, including a toaster and a coffee machine. The Wi-Fi works very well. It seems that the people who wrote that there was no Wi-Fi probably just forgot to turn on the router... The people who work with guests, especially Dona Carolina, are very kind and warm-hearted. They were always available. Dona Carolina brought us homemade eggs, and she is a person with a very big heart. Do not expect luxury. This is a solid rustic country house for a fair price.

The only downside is that there is no dishwasher.

When I grew up as a kid in Uruguay, the small town we lived in was very close to rural environments and beautiful nature. Oddly enough, this particular property is in a setting that brought MANY beautiful child memories back to life for me. It's really close to amazing nature, it's calm and peaceful and the house itself had all I could wish for during my stay. I am quite sure I will return!

Even though this rural home does not have a staff on site per say, there is one detail I strongly feel I need to comment. The owner of the property is the sweetest and kindest German lady you can find, but she speaks no English or Portuguese. Probably based on this detail, she is fronted by a proxy company (Da Silva Holidays) here on booking.com. The purpose of such a company is two-folded. The first one is to professionally represent the property owner and the second is to provide a responsive interface to you as the renting customer. In my strong opinion, related to my reservation, this proxy company is performing considerably below average on both these responsibilities. During the many years I have used booking.com, I have grown accustomed to response times from properties of tops 24 hours. The proxy company for this property applied a considerably lethargic approach of representation, where written queries could remain unanswered for several days. This included questions regarding the initial transaction placed on my credit card that did not match the information of payment as presented for the property in booking.com when the reservation was confirmed. When I emphasized that the misleading information probably should be corrected to avoid future confusion to other customers, my comment was simply shrugged away by their representative. I find the lack of interest to correct the payment information to be, to say the least, highly unprofessional. As my leading questions around my arrival time simply never got answered, I finally reverted to contacting the property owner directly. Even though my old school German was severely rusty and Google Translate had to come to my rescue, the owner and I managed to resolve my questions in minutes, instead of with the remarkably slow communication speed of the proxy company. I think this is a detail worth knowing.