Walk in Serra de Monchique

You start with a walk through the forests around a village on the eastern edge of Serra de Monchique. The trails wind through eucalyptus, cork oak, and chestnut, with occasional views over the valleys and hills that have shaped this rural economy for centuries. The forest floor is often thick with ferns, moss, and cistus — the vegetation of a mountain that gets far more rainfall than the coast twenty kilometres south.

This is the greenest, most humid part of the Algarve — a subtropical microclimate that supports species you don't find on the coast, including the critically endangered Monchique oak. Your guide points out how the forests are managed, and how the mountain's ecology intersects with the small farms tucked into its slopes.