Five days in the Algarve: one base, and one booking you must make in advance

Two recent changes make most “5 days in the Algarve” itineraries out of date. Since 1 January 2025 the motorway that crosses the region is free: 133 km at no cost, where the full run used to charge up to €11.70. And since July 2024, you can no longer swim into Benagil, or paddle in on a rented kayak without a guide. The first fact removes any reason to move hotel; the second means you must book one thing, and one only, before everything else.

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The two facts that date most itineraries

Before carving up five days, two pieces of information need correcting — most online guides have not updated them. They pull the itinerary in opposite directions.

Take the first line. The A22, the Via do Infante, no longer charges. It is one of seven former “SCUT” motorways whose tolls were removed on 1 January 2025 — close to 951 kilometres nationwide. Before that date the full run cost between €4.65 and €11.70 depending on vehicle class, charged with no barrier at which to pay, which is exactly why so many rental invoices came as a surprise weeks later.

⚠️ That correction has not filtered through to online travel content. One guide consulted while writing this still quoted “around nine cents a kilometre”; another described the A22 as “a toll road since 2011”, with no mention of the abolition. We therefore checked the fact against the Portuguese national press of 1 January 2025, not against travel guides.

📌 One clarification, because it matters: only the Algarve became free. Motorways elsewhere in Portugal — the A2 coming down from Lisbon, for instance — still charge, and their payment system deserves an article of its own. It will get one.

Benagil: what has been banned since July 2024

The Benagil cave is probably the image that made you come. So it is worth being plain about what you can still do there, because the answer has changed and plenty of travellers find out on the spot, in August, in front of a beach where they are turned away.

Since July 2024, by order of the Portimão maritime authority, swimming into the cave and inside it is banned, floats and rings included. Renting a kayak or paddleboard without a guide is banned. And landing on the beach inside is banned for everyone, private visitors and companies alike. Time inside is capped at five to ten minutes per group, and supervision requires one guide kayak for every six visitor kayaks. Operators who ignore the rules face fines from €300 to €216,000. In May 2025 the head of Algarve tourism confirmed the rules would stay, having judged them effective.

🟢 Start with what costs nothing, because it is the best surprise on this coast. The cave has a circular opening in its roof, and that opening can be seen from the clifftop, on foot, for free. The Seven Hanging Valleys trail — 5.7 km one way, two and a half to three hours — runs from Vale de Centeanes near Carvoeiro to Praia da Marinha, and it passes directly above. You walk the cliff edge, you watch the shaft of light drop into the chamber, you carry on to the double arch at Marinha. No booking, no ticket.

If you want to be inside the cave, though, exactly one legal route remains: the guided trip. Booking a guided trip to the Benagil cave settles both access and legality at once, since these operators are the only ones allowed in. Book early: it is the single fixed slot in your week, and in high season the morning departures — calmer sea, better light down the shaft — go first.

⚠️ One safety note with nothing commercial about it: this coast is limestone and cliff collapses are real, signposted on the beaches around here. Do not settle in under an overhang, and respect the marked-off areas, at the top and at the bottom.

The itinerary, day by day

Five days, one base, no repacking. Distances are by road, rounded, and measured from the Lagos–Carvoeiro stretch.

Look at the right-hand column. Four days out of five stay under forty minutes of driving, and the fifth — the east — happens once. That is precisely what a free motorway buys you: distance has stopped being an expense.

⚠️ Day 3 is the only one that cannot move. It is pinned to your Benagil departure time, and everything else arranges itself around it. Take a morning slot, then walk straight on to the trail from Vale de Centeanes or from Marinha, depending on where you leave the car. It is the fullest day of the week and the only one where being late costs you something.

📌 Day 5 deliberately has no fixed plan. Over five days on the Atlantic there is almost always one windy or misty morning that spoils an outing — that day is there to absorb it. If the weather held, simply go back wherever you wanted to stay longer.

One base, not four

This is the real decision of the trip, and it fits in a sentence: settle once, between Lagos and Carvoeiro, and do not move again.

The reasoning is arithmetic. Changing hotel means vacating the room late morning, dragging bags around during the brightest hours of the day, then waiting for the next room in mid-afternoon. Two moves across five days is half a day gone — to save twenty minutes of daily driving on a motorway that no longer costs anything. The sums do not work, and they only half worked before 2025.

On the car, one practical point: pick it up on arrival at Faro airport and keep it for the five days. Faro to Lagos is about 90 kilometres, an hour on the A22. Comparing local rental firms in Portugal lets you see the off-airport branches, often cheaper on short hires — though in the Algarve specifically, where you collect and return in the same place, the simplicity of the airport has a case. Above all check the fuel policy and the excess before you confirm.

📌 One thing that is no longer a problem but that you will be asked about: you no longer need a toll transponder to drive around the Algarve. If the rental desk offers you an automatic billing device and you are not leaving the region, it will do nothing for you. It becomes useful again the moment you head north towards Lisbon.

What five days do not contain

A short week does not cover the whole region, and it is better to say so than to imply otherwise. This itinerary does not include the interior — the Serra de Monchique, the white villages inland, the markets that are not on the coast. Nor does it include the Alentejo, or Lisbon, roughly three hours north: adding the capital would turn these five days into a motorway corridor.

It does not include the Atlantic west coast beyond Sagres either, the surfers’ coast and the south-west Alentejo natural park. It is magnificent, it is windy, and it needs its own trip.

What it does contain holds together: two days in the west between jagged cliffs and the end of the continent, a day of limestone and caves in the centre, a lagoon day in the east, and a spare day. That is a five-day rhythm, not a two-week digest — and above all, it is five nights in the same bed.

In short

Two facts lead to the same place. The motorway crossing the Algarve has been free since 1 January 2025, so distance no longer costs money and there is no reason to move: one base between Lagos and Carvoeiro covers all five days. Benagil can no longer be improvised since July 2024, so something must be booked — but only one thing, and everything else arranges itself around it.

If you remember one sentence: book Benagil first, the hotel second, and book nothing else. The Seven Hanging Valleys trail asks nothing of anyone — and it may well be the finest thing you do all week.