You will NOT get a peaceful, restful holiday here – it’s next door to a small holding. Dogs bark through the day up to midnight and the cockerel(s) start at 4.30am. A road runs past the bedroom windows with cars running to and from a spa resort nearby.
We bought ear-plugs to stand a chance of getting any sleep.
Double glazing but no A/C - on warm nights you sleep with the windows open. The master bedroom has a ceiling fan, but it is noisy, buzzing all the time. There is one other small desk fan.
The beds are terrible – not just firm, they are rock hard with no padding. Joe provided us with a 1cm mattress topper, but it made no difference. We used pool lounger mattresses until Joe provided a second, equally thin, mattress topper.
The master bedroom has en-suite facilities including a good shower but it only has a four-foot bed. The full-size double bed (with the mattress toppers) is in another room with no en-suite.
There is no information in the villa at all. Nothing about shops, restaurants, what to do with rubbish, emergency info etc. No information about the Wi-Fi (the Wi-Fi code scribbled on a piece of paper and sellotaped to the wall). No instructions for the utilities other than their Portuguese handbooks. You are on your own to work everything out.
DVD is all but unwatchable. Its loose scart lead has to be fiddled with to get a poor-quality picture with dreadful buzzing sound. We bought a new LG DVD player for 30 Euros which instantly improved things.
The kitchen tap spurts water horizontally unless you fiddle with it, and was like that the day we left.
The original kettle was didn’t always work, but Joe replaced it after we sent him a text.
The BBQ hadn’t been cleaned when we arrived – my first job was emptying the ashes.
A couple of the patio chairs are broken. Both the patio tables show their age.
Just one small cheap parasol + a pile of broken parasols stacked in a corner - we bought a second.
The pool has tiles missing and cracks on the sides. It is NOT clean. When we arrived, it had algae in places around the sides and was a little cloudy. By the time we left, it was so murky you could barely see the bottom. The steps green with algae and there was a diving beetle in it for a while. For the last two days, we didn’t swim in case we got an infection.
I sent Joe several texts whilst there but never got a reply, and he never came to see us, never asked how we were getting on or to offer any help.