The Hotel da Penina, Henry Cotton and the making of the Algarve, 1966

On Saturday 5 November 1966 the President of the Republic, Admiral Américo Tomás, began a three-day official visit to the Algarve by opening a hotel. The Hotel do Golfe da Penina stood about four kilometres outside Portimão, on the road to the neighbouring town of Lagos. Tomás declared the golf course and the hotel open, lunched there and took his time touring what the Lisbon paper Diário de Lisboa called its luxurious and functional facilities.2 sources2 sources

At the town hall in Portimão, the mayor told him that the hotel and its course made up “a tourist complex unique in the country”. By mid-afternoon the presidential party had moved on to Tavira, where Tomás and the justice minister, Antunes Varela, opened a new courthouse. That night the President slept at the inn of São Brás de Alportel.1 source1 source

The Tavira weekly Povo Algarvio called the Penina “the largest and most luxurious hotel in the Algarve”, with one of the biggest golf courses in Europe. The tour was part of the regime's celebrations of the fortieth anniversary of what it called the National Revolution of 1926. In Tavira the crowds turned out in persistent rain and unusual cold.1 source1 source

That day's Diário de Lisboa put the opening at the top of its front page, beside Florence under floodwater and an interview in which the dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar, discussed Portugal's overseas territories with the French paper Le Figaro.1 source1 source

At the start of the 1960s the Algarve, Portugal's southern coast, was still cut off from the rest of the country. The historian Joana Gaspar de Freitas and the marine geologist João Alveirinho Dias describe a region with no airport, no port able to take cruise ships, badly laid roads, an obsolete railway to Lisbon and far too few hotel beds. Its people lived mostly from farming and fishing, and the state's first tourism plan, in 1963, promised that planned growth would not harm either.1 source1 source

The Estado Novo, the authoritarian regime that would fall in April 1974, wanted foreign currency, and by the mid-1960s it was fighting a colonial war on several fronts in Africa. Spain was already earning millions from tourists. In 1965 the government's interim development plan declared the Algarve a privileged tourism region, and the state backed private investors there.1 source1 source

Some saw the danger early. In February 1961 the architect Francisco Keil do Amaral warned in Diário de Lisboa that speculators after “large and quick profits” were already spoiling the coast. Keil himself finished a tourism study of the Algarve for the public works minister in 1962, and state bodies commissioned a string of others, among them a regional plan by the Italian architect Luigi Dodi that divided the coast into eleven sectors. Dodi wanted stretches of the cliffs between Sagres and Quarteira left unbuilt and limits on height and density in the towns, but his plan was never made binding.2 sources2 sources

The change that mattered came by air. Américo Tomás opened Faro airport on 11 July 1965, and a TAP aircraft from Lisbon landed just before 12.30 carrying dozens of guests. In 1966, the year the Penina opened, nearly 59,000 passengers passed through it.1 source1 source

The Penina was a British idea. John Stilwell, whom Observador credits with imagining and founding it, invited Henry Cotton in the early 1960s to design a golf course on a rice field at the Tapada da Penina. Cotton had won the Open Championship three times, in 1934, 1937 and 1948, and eleven national Opens elsewhere in Europe.2 sources2 sources

The land was flat and waterlogged. Cotton had to dry it out, and he used the drainage ditches as hazards. Then he planted trees, though the number depends on who tells it: about 250,000 trees and flowering shrubs according to the local paper in 1966, about 300,000 according to Observador, and close to 400,000 in an American golf writer's account quoted by the resort.3 sources3 sources

The course opened to the public on 1 June 1966, five months before the hotel. The weekly Comércio de Portimão described 18 holes over 72 hectares, 6,739 metres long, which it called the longest course in Europe. An automatic sprinkler system fed by 39 kilometres of irrigation pipes watered it, using 2,000 cubic metres of water a day. Because of the mild climate, the paper added, it could be played all year round.1 source1 source

The architect Leonardo de Castro Freire designed the hotel as a long, low building of only three floors in what the paper called the Algarve style, with 214 air-conditioned rooms decorated by the Conde de Lencastre. Its owner, the Sociedade Turística da Penina, was run by Stilwell, Vasco Taborda Ferreira and Lionel E. Webb, and worked with the Swiss company Gauer Hotels.1 source1 source

The plans went well beyond a hotel. They included a riding school, two swimming pools, one of them Olympic size, tennis courts, clay-pigeon shooting, a beach club at Alvor with a planned cable car link, an airstrip and about 150 private villas. The paper concluded that the Penina was the most notable venture for the development of tourism in the Algarve.1 source1 source

It was the region's first grass golf course, though not the first golf of any kind. Golf reached the Algarve in 1937, when nine holes of packed earth and burnt oil were laid out at Praia da Rocha, near Portimão. Little is known about that course, the president of the Portuguese Golf Federation told Observador, except that it soon closed. Within a few years of the Penina, Vale do Lobo and Vilamoura were being developed further east.1 source1 source

Two years after the opening, the Penina got publicity no tourist board could have bought. In December 1968 Paul McCartney was on holiday at the hotel with Linda Eastman, whom he later married. In the version told by Observador, at about one in the morning the couple stopped at the hotel to change five pounds into escudos before heading on to Sobe e Desce, a nightclub in Carvoeiro. The resident band, Jotta Herre, recognised him, and he stayed playing with them until four.2 sources2 sources

That night he made up a tune and named it after the hotel. McCartney later recalled sitting in on drums and the band asking him for a song. Jotta Herre released “Penina” on an EP in March 1969, and the Portuguese singer Carlos Mendes recorded his own version the same year. On 9 January 1969, during the Beatles' Get Back sessions in London, McCartney played it with John Lennon and Ringo Starr.1 source1 source

The song brought foreign music journalists to the Algarve, from the Daily Mail and the New Musical Express in London to Rock and Folk in Paris. Jornal do Algarve, reporting in July 1969 that the song had just come out on record abroad, described it as a short refrain McCartney had composed during his stay in the Algarve. It noted drily that the visitors liked the hotel more than the tune.1 source1 source

McCartney never released the song himself. Asked in 1994 whether he ever would, he answered: “I shouldn't think I'd ever record it myself!”1 source1 source

The Penina opened as the Algarve took off. Foreign guests spent about 30,000 nights in the district's hotels in 1960, 500,000 in 1967 and almost 1.5 million in 1972. Freitas and Dias put the growth down partly to Faro airport and partly to northern European tour operators looking for beaches that were not yet crowded.1 source1 source

The whole country was changing the same way. Portugal received a million tourists in 1964, two million in 1967 and three million in 1970, according to the national statistics cited by the architectural historian Susana Lobo.1 source1 source

Golf grew with it. By 2015 the region had more than 40 courses, and golfers played more than 1.2 million rounds there that year, a record. In 2019 more than 700 golf tour operators voted the Algarve the world's best golf destination for 2020. Of the roughly 90 courses in Portugal in 2024, nearly half were in the Algarve.3 sources3 sources

The Penina kept a place in national life. In January 1975, nine months after the revolution of April 1974 ended the dictatorship, troops cordoned off the area, set up road checkpoints and moved the hotel's guests out for the summit between Portugal and Angola's three liberation movements that produced the Alvor Agreement on Angolan independence. The Portuguese Open was first played on Cotton's course in 1973, when the Spaniard Jaime Benito beat Bernard Gallacher in a play-off, and came back nine more times.4 sources4 sources

The planners' fears came true. Freitas and Dias describe building outrunning the rules from the 1960s on, with breaches accepted as the price of progress. After April 1974 came what one writer called the first great wave of building in the Algarve, when dozens of hotels and holiday villages were approved with no thought for their setting, or for whether they could be supplied with drinking water and had somewhere to send their sewage.1 source1 source

By the early 1980s the bills were arriving. In summer the taps ran short, and what water came out was often brackish. In Albufeira the town's sewage reached the sea through a pipe on the beach, and every year tourists went home with dysentery. At Monte Gordo, near the Spanish border, a ten-storey hotel went up without a permit, and a beach of small houses turned into a town of large blocks.1 source1 source

The shore itself began to give way. Erosion is natural on this coast, but building on the seafront and the loss of river sand to dams, marinas and groynes have sped it up since the middle of the twentieth century. Buildings on the cliffs have collapsed, among them the old Forte Novo and houses at Vale do Lobo, and at spring tides the sea floods streets on the Ilha de Faro.1 source1 source

When coastal zone plans finally came in the 1990s, they had to accept what was already there. The plan for the coast between Burgau and Vilamoura, approved in 1999, in effect ratified the building of the 1970s and 1980s. Exemptions for “projects of national interest” kept new resorts coming: in 2009 there were twelve in the Algarve, representing 14,000 more beds.1 source1 source

Golf brought its own bill. In 1966, by the local paper's account, the Penina course alone used 2,000 cubic metres of water a day. In January 2024, with the Algarve's reservoirs at a quarter of capacity, Diário de Notícias reported that in the drought of the previous June the government had cut golf courses' irrigation quotas to 20 per cent, or 50 per cent for courses able to reuse treated wastewater. The paper put tourism's share of the region's water use at about 12 per cent, an environment agency estimate, and golf's at about 6 per cent, a figure from the golf industry.2 sources2 sources

The Penina is still a golf hotel, now a five-star resort with three courses: Cotton's 18-hole Championship course, one of the oldest in the country, and two shorter ones. Among its furnishings is a piano that once belonged to Queen Amélia.2 sources2 sources

Cotton spent much of his later life in Portugal and Spain. English Heritage says he moved back to London in 1986, four years after the death of his partner, Toots, and died in 1987 of a heart attack, having accepted a knighthood he did not live to receive. He was the first golfer to be knighted. Observador's account says he died at the Penina.2 sources2 sources

The traffic has kept growing. Faro airport, officially named Aeroporto Gago Coutinho since 2022, handled more than 10.3 million passengers in 2025, its sixtieth year, and 33 airlines flew there.2 sources2 sources