The Story
Burgau was a fishing village long before it was anything else. Whitewashed houses hemmed in blue. Boats drawn up on the cove. The catch landed at dusk. It still is.
Salsalito sits just above it, where the gardens begin: an intimate casa designed and built by Ralph and Sally themselves.
Ralph and Sally
Ralph came from Sidmouth in Devon, a tool engineer who found this coast in the seventies and stayed for good. With Keith Shepherd he became one of the hands that built Burgau as it is: the Beach Bar on the sand, Smugglers in the village.
Sally was born in Sussex and raised in the South of France. In seventies London she worked with the designer Bill Gibb and ran his New Bond Street shop. She came to the Algarve in 1979, helped run the Beach Bar, taught water skiing beside Ralph, and designed Smugglers herself. Later she kept her own boutique in Praia da Luz for twenty years, putting on fashion shows for charity along the coast.
Together they made Salsalito slowly, room by room, and kept it personal.
Hand painted tiles. Collected ceramics. Beams overhead reclaimed from an old sardine factory on this coast. A pool encased in a rock waterfall, and a summer room with a bread oven built into its chimney.
An honesty bar where you write down your own drinks in your room's little book. Travellers came from every corner of the world, and a good many came back year after year.
Pool & Gardens
Ralph died in 2019. The village he helped make is his still, in every worn blue corner, and his hand lives on through the casa: the furniture in the Bamboo room was made by him. Sally is here yet, with the same welcome, three languages, and the same long memory of the coast.
The casa opens a little wider
Four rooms are becoming nine, no more than nine, by design. A restaurant named Maré takes the terrace and the wood fire. A bar takes the evening. A spa takes the gardens.
Everything will be finer than it was, and nothing will change: the same warmth, the same unhurried spirit, the same worn blue light.
la vida en azul
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