Figueira da Foz

Figueira da Foz spreads Europe's living room onto the sand. Where the Mondego meets the Atlantic, the "Queen of the Beaches" earned her nineteenth-century title with an urban beach of preposterous width — hundreds of metres of flat sand between the esplanade and the surf, so broad the walk to the water is itself the constitutional — and the resort architecture to match: the Casino Figueira, among the Iberian peninsula's oldest gaming houses, has been dealing since the Belle Époque, when Spanish and Portuguese society summered here together. Buarcos's fishing quarter keeps the older trade at the bay's north end, below the Serra da Boa Viagem's pine lookouts; the salt pans upriver still harvest flor de sal by hand.

The town's cultural flagship is the CAE — the Centro de Artes e Espectáculos, whose main hall is the "CAE Hall" documented in the concert record — a modern arts centre of metropolitan capacity whose concert, theatre and dance seasons, plus congresses and festivals, give the resort a year-round pulse the summer crowds never see. Surf championships at Cabedelo, a literary pedigree (the town cherishes its cafés' tertúlias), and that implausible sand: Figueira da Foz remains what the Belle Époque made it — a casino with an ocean attached.