The Hotel
A house of nine rooms above Burgau, kept lightly across three acres of tropical garden. Hand-painted tiles, collected ceramics and the worn blue light of the Algarve — a place to be calm, to be curious, and to live la vida en azul.
An old house,
kept lightly
Three acres of tropical garden above the cove, restored with local craftspeople — the tiles glazed in Lagos — and left, where we could, exactly as we found it.
La vida en azul
Burgau was a fishing village long before it was anything else — whitewashed houses hemmed in blue, boats drawn up on the cove, the catch landed at dusk. It still is. Salsalito sits just above it, where the gardens begin.
In the 1970s an Englishman named Ralph Eveleigh came to this coast as an engineer and stayed for the light. With Sally — who arrived in 1979 by way of Sussex, the south of France and a life in fashion — he helped make Burgau what it became: the Beach Bar down at the water, and, on the slope above, a house called Salsalito.
They built it slowly, room by room, and kept it personal — hand-painted tiles, collected ceramics, a pool set into a rock waterfall, an honesty bar where you wrote down your own drinks. Travellers came from every corner of the world, and a good many came back. The pace never changed.
Ralph died in 2019. The house he and Sally made — and the village they helped shape — are his still, in every worn blue corner. Sally is here yet, forty years in, with the same welcome and the same long memory of the coast.
Now Salsalito opens a little wider. Four rooms have become nine — no more than nine, by design, so the whole house still feels like your own. A restaurant, Restaurante Maré, takes the terrace and the wood fire; a small spa takes water and warmth. Everything is finer than it was, and nothing has changed: the same family warmth, the same unhurried spirit, the same worn blue light.