Self-Guided Tours in Algarve

The Algarve's self-guided offer is entirely self-drive, and that follows from the region's shape: 155 kilometres of coast plus the Alentejo plains behind it don't fit inside a single walking route the way Faro's or Braga's old town does. The routes on sale link the western cliffs around Lagos and Portimao, the eastern lagoon past Faro, and inland Alentejo towns, with some continuing across the border into Andalucia rather than stopping at it. A rental car is the whole premise here, not an option alongside a walking game.

Each route is sold as a day-by-day plan — a road file for a phone or GPS, timed to cover a set number of days, with hotels typically left to the traveller rather than bundled in. That is the opposite of a city scavenger hunt: instead of a fixed loop through one old town in two hours, it is an open plan across several days where stops can run long or short depending on the weather and the mood. Multi-country versions cross into Andalucia for a look at Seville or the Alhambra without adding a second booking.

Practical. Summer highs reach about 30C along the coast with almost no rain, cooler and windier inland after dark; winter stays near 16C. The A22 motorway runs the length of the region on electronic-only tolls, so a hire car needs its transponder arranged before the first drive. Signal drops in stretches of the inland Alentejo, so offline maps are worth downloading before leaving the coast. Cave and boat side-trips built into some routes run on the swell rather than the calendar and get rescheduled at short notice.