The Legends Head for the Dunes: Comporta Hosts Its First Senior Tour Event

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Major champions, a Ryder Cup captain and free admission. Comporta has rather outdone itself.

For a stretch of coast long described as Portugal’s best-kept secret, Comporta is making an increasingly poor job of keeping it. From 30 October to 1 November 2026, Pinheirinho Golf Course hosts the inaugural Portugal Legends Championship, the newest stop on the Staysure Legends Tour. Entry for spectators is free. In golf, that is practically unheard of.

Who’s Teeing It Up

The field is expected to include Michael Campbell, who held off Tiger Woods to win the 2005 US Open at Pinehurst, and Paul McGinley, Europe’s winning Ryder Cup captain at Gleneagles in 2014. Two of McGinley’s team from that week, Jamie Donaldson and Stephen Gallacher, are also slated to play. Donaldson hit the wedge to the 15th green that won the Cup, and there is a plaque on the fairway to prove it. (Golf Business News)

A fairway at Pinheirinho Golf Course in Comporta running between umbrella pines and sandy dunes

A Course Brought Back From the Brink

Pinheirinho has had a more eventful life than most golf courses. Designed by Jorge Santana da Silva as part of an ambitious tourism and property project, it closed not long after it was first unveiled. A change of ownership brought eighteen of the original twenty-seven holes back into play, and the course reopened in 2022.

The second act has been kinder. The layout threads through secondary dunes and pine forest, with heavily sculpted bunkering and a 3.5-hectare lake for those who like their jeopardy wet. The clubhouse is by Jacobsen Arquitetura, and Six Senses Comporta, the brand’s first resort in Portugal, sits on the same estate with access to 60 kilometres of Alentejo coastline.

Two More Reasons to Stay the Week

Three days of watching legends is a fine start, but nobody flies to Lisbon to keep their clubs in the bag. Down the road at Terras da Comporta, David McLay-Kidd’s Dunas Course has long been the headline act, and it now shares the bill with the Torre Course, the first signature design by Sergio García. Torre opened in the summer of 2025, plays to par 72 over 6,790 yards, and was named the world’s best new golf course at the 2025 World Golf Awards. (Golf Monthly) (Rus Tourism News)

That makes three serious courses within a short drive of one another, all about an hour south of Lisbon. Dunas is the bold links-style test, Torre the more strategic thinker’s round, and Pinheirinho the woodland interlude between them. A week here does not repeat itself.

The second hole of the Torre Course at Terras da Comporta, with sandy waste areas and pine trees

Rice Fields and Long Lunches

Comporta is rice country, and the paddies that line the road in from the north are not decoration. Order the arroz de marisco at lunch and you are eating the local crop. The village itself remains resolutely low-rise, all thatched roofs and barefoot beach restaurants, which is precisely why people who could go anywhere keep coming here.

How to Watch

The Portugal Legends Championship runs over three rounds, from Friday 30 October to Sunday 1 November 2026. Tickets are free; spectators simply register their interest on the tournament page. The autumn timing suits the Alentejo nicely, with the summer crowds long gone and the light rather better for it. (Legends Tour)

Browse our Lisbon golf holidays and build a Comporta week around the Legends, or come later and play the courses in peace.

Camiral: The Course Booked for Golf’s Next Ryder Cup

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Catalonia’s two championship layouts, six years before the crowds arrive.

Camiral, in the Girona countryside an hour north of Barcelona, has just been named host of the 2031 Ryder Cup. It is only the second Spanish venue in the competition’s history, following Valderrama in 1997, and the decision changes what a round here means. The two championship courses have always been serious golf. Now they come with a deadline attached.

Golfer checking in a golf travel bag at airport departures before a golf holiday

A Second Ryder Cup for Spain

Ryder Cup Europe’s selection of Camiral makes Spain the first country on the continent to host the event twice, a decision framed by chief executive Guy Kinnings as recognition of Spanish golf’s long-standing contribution to the competition. Sergio García remains the Ryder Cup’s all-time points leader, and Jon Rahm has been one of Europe’s defining players across the last three editions. Camiral now carries that history forward. (ESPN)

Stadium and Tour — Two Different Tests

Camiral operates two courses, and they reward different games. The Camiral Stadium is the tougher of the pair, having hosted a DP World Tour event three times, most recently in 2022, and the European Tour’s Qualifying School Final Stage on seven occasions since 2008.

Camiral Stadium course fairway with the Girona countryside behind, Costa Brava
Next door, the Camiral Tour was built to the same standard but wider, with larger greens that give a broader range of handicaps a fair shot at scoring well. Both share ground that was originally earmarked for a Grand Prix circuit before Formula 1 relocated to Montmeló — golf got the better draw. Between now and 2031, the resort will also host the Estrella Damm Catalunya Championship each year from 2028 to 2030, so the countdown is already on the calendar. (ESPN)

Camiral Tour course, the kinder option

Girona and the Costa Brava Table

The resort itself, now trading as Camiral after years as PGA Catalunya, sits a five-minute transfer from Girona airport. Girona itself is worth the detour on a rest day — a walled old town of stone stairways and a cathedral that climbs straight up from the Onyar river, with a market culture built on Catalan cooking rather than tourist menus. Barcelona is an hour away if the trip stretches to a long weekend either side of the golf. (The Independent)

Historic Old tow Girona

Play It Before 2031

Ryder Cup venues rarely get quieter as the event approaches. Valderrama’s profile only grew after 1997, and Camiral will follow the same curve — more attention, fuller tee sheets, and eventually a course that plays host to the loudest week in golf. Six years is not a long runway. The Stadium and Tour courses are booking-ready now, at a stage where a serious golfer can play the same fairways the world’s best will contest without the surrounding circus.

Camiral joins a shortlist of courses that will only get harder to book quietly. Browse Costa Brava golf holidays and get there ahead of 2031.

Monte Rei Rebuilt: The Algarve’s Number One Returns on 14 September

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Five months closed. Every green rebuilt. What comes back is not quite the course that shut in April.

The Monte Rei North Golf Course, the eastern Algarve’s flagship, has been off the map since 13 April. It reopens on 14 September. Five months is a long absence for a top ranked Jack Nicklaus Signature design, and the work carried out in that window, goes considerably beyond seasonal maintenance.

Monte Rei main resort

What Actually Changed

This was not a cosmetic tidy-up. The greens have been reconstructed, along with their collars and surrounds. Bunkers have been renovated. Cart paths and access roads have been refurbished. That list covers the surfaces a golfer interacts with on every hole of the round, which is why the closure ran to five months rather than five weeks.

Monte Rei main resort

The Work You Will Not See

Monte Rei framed the project carefully when it announced the closure in February, describing improvements designed to enhance the course while “remaining true to the character, values and playing experience envisioned by Jack Nicklaus.” The intention is restoration of quality, not redesign. Golfers returning in September should expect the same course, playing better.

The more consequential part of the project sits underground. The irrigation system and pumping station have both been modernised, and water efficiency was named as a central focus of the intervention from the outset.

The timing is not accidental. Algarve golf courses collectively use around 15 cubic hectometres of water a year, and the region has spent the past eighteen months building the infrastructure to supply a growing share of that from treated reused water rather than boreholes and dams. A five-month closure is the only realistic opportunity a course of this standing gets to rebuild its irrigation from the ground up. Monte Rei took it.

Eighteen Signature Holes

The North Course opened in 2007 and remains the only Jack Nicklaus Signature course in Portugal. It runs to 7,181 yards from the tournament tees, plays to a par of 72, and brings water into play on eleven holes. The setting does much of the work — the foothills of the Serra do Caldeirão behind, the Atlantic visible to the south, cork oak and pine throughout.

Monte Rei course map

Nicklaus himself visited in 2019 and put the design philosophy more plainly than any brochure has managed since: “You didn’t hire me to design a signature hole, you wanted me to design 18 signature holes, and that’s what we tried to do.”

Reopening Into the Best Month of the Year

September is a shrewd date to come back. October is the single busiest month for golf in the Algarve — 179,000 rounds played across the region, ahead of April on 162,000 and March on 153,000, from a record annual total of 1.46 million. The North Course reopens with a fortnight to settle before that window opens.

Dining to match the elite golfing experience

The rest of the resort never closed. The villas, the spa, the pool and the restaurants have operated throughout, including Vistas Rui Silvestre, which first took a Michelin star in 2019. Guests who booked Monte Rei this summer for everything except the golf have not been short of reasons to stay.

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Autumn in the eastern Algarve is quieter than the Golden Triangle, warmer than most people expect, and — from mid-September — back to full strength. Browse our Algarve golf holidays and see what the eastern end of the coast is holding.


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