Alentejo
Comporta is sixty kilometres of sand with almost nothing built on it, and behind the dune a flat landscape of rice fields, pine and cork. It is the smallest market on this site and the highest-value one: a luxury second-home and destination-wedding corner with very little English-language competition, which is unusual for anywhere this photogenic. What it offers photographically is space and simplicity. The beach runs unbroken far enough that a session never has anyone else in frame, the paddies flood and mirror the sky in spring, and the local architecture is single-storey, white and thatched, which is a background rather than a distraction. What it does not offer is anything to do when the weather turns — there is no old town to move into — so a winter booking here is made with that understood.
May and June are the best of it: the paddies are flooded and reflective, the pines are in full green and the beach is empty. September is warm and quiet again after the Lisbon exodus of August, which is the one month the place is genuinely full. Winter is beautiful and bleak, with nowhere indoors to retreat to, and a session then is planned with that accepted rather than discovered.
Here is where to shoot in Comporta, with ideal times and permit notes.
Open Atlantic, a single wooden walkway over the dune, and enough kilometres in either direction that nobody is in the frame. Facing west, so it is entirely an evening location.
Flat water to the horizon with storks standing in it and the sky doubled. It lasts as long as the fields are flooded and it is the one thing here that looks like nowhere else in Portugal.
Umbrella pines over sand tracks, with long shadows and nothing else in them. The alternative when the wind on the beach is too much, which between April and September it often is by late afternoon.
These come under the Comporta rate: a photographer travels out from the city at no extra charge, and the session is priced exactly as it would be in Comporta itself.
About an hour and a quarter by car over the Vasco da Gama bridge, or an hour to Setúbal and the ferry across to Troia. There is no useful public transport once you arrive, so a session here assumes a car.