Albufeira, Algarve
Praia dos Arrifes
The smallest of the three, with two rock towers standing in the shallows
Written by Tiago, who grew up in Albufeira and drives a tuk tuk down to this cove most days.
Arrifes is the one people mean when they say "the secret beach". It is small — genuinely small, a pocket of sand hemmed in by cliffs — with two sandstone towers sitting in the water in front of it that make every photograph look staged.
Because it is small, it feels full quickly. Twenty people is a busy day. That is the trade: it is the prettiest of the three and the one you are most likely to arrive at and find no room.
- Parking
- An unpaved clearing in the pine woods above the cliff, room for roughly a dozen cars. In August it is gone by ten in the morning.
- Getting down to the sand
- Wooden steps down from the car park. There are not many of them — the cliff is low here compared with the coves either side.
- What's there
- A seafood restaurant above the beach (A Sardinha), toilets, showers, and about ten sunbeds, with lifeguards in summer. Blue Flag.
- Swimming
- Clear water and shallow close in, around the towers. It is a narrow cove with rock on both sides, so it is worth watching where children swim rather than treating it as a paddling pool. Lifeguarded in summer.
- Shade
- Very little. The cliff is low here, so the shadow arrives late and does not reach far, and there are only about ten sunbeds. After those it is your own umbrella or nothing.
- With children
- Fewer steps than the other two, which helps with small legs, and the two towers are the thing children remember about the whole holiday. But it is tiny — on a busy afternoon there is genuinely nowhere to put a family of four down.
- Without a car
- Route 75 again, and again infrequent. It is four kilometres from the centre of Albufeira — ten minutes by road, well over an hour on foot, and the walk is not a pleasant one.
- When to go
- Early, or accept you may be turning round. Mobile signal is poor here, so if you taxi out, book the return before you lose it.
- How long to stay
- An hour or two. One restaurant above it and nothing else, and it sits between Castelo and town, so it works better as one stop in a morning than as the whole morning.
Going with Tiago
Getting here is the hard part.
A stop on The Secret Beaches — and the reason the tour exists, because parking is the whole problem. It's why this is a tour and not a set of directions. 3 hours in a tuk tuk, your group only, picked up at your hotel door and dropped back after — this cove and the ones either side of it, without circling a dirt car park that filled up at ten in the morning.
Two adults and two children is €195 — for a private vehicle and a driver for the whole run, every cove on this stretch of coast, the lift there and back, and the photographs.
- Private. Your group only, up to 4 of you in the tuk tuk, never shared with strangers.
- Picked up at your hotel door and dropped back after — no car park to find, no bus to miss, and no taxi to call from a beach with no signal.
- The photographs are included. 15 to 20 of them, on your WhatsApp the same evening, and nothing to sign up to on the day.
And nothing to risk on it if I'm more than fifteen minutes late and haven't messaged you, the tour is free, if the weather's against us I move you to a better day, as many times as you like while you're here, and I never cut a tour short to get back for the next one.
10% off, today
There's a code that takes 10% off.
Leave me your email and it's on screen straight away — ten per cent off, so that family of four comes to €175.50. The week plan comes with it: seven days in Albufeira without a hire car, and which beaches you genuinely can't walk to.
Code applies to The Secret Beaches and The Other Algarve. One per booking.