Setúbal is not a resort. It is a fishing and container port forty minutes south of Lisbon that happens to sit on one of the most beautiful estuaries in Europe, and it has never quite decided to trade on the fact.
Pensão Maré Alta is a fourteen-room guesthouse on the third and fourth floors of a building on the harbour front, above a shop that sells rope. The lift is small, slow and original. The paint in the stairwell is the colour of weak tea. Nothing about the approach prepares you for the rooms.
The green room
Nine of the fourteen face the water. Ours — they call it the green room, and the walls are a deep bottle green that ought to be oppressive and is not — has a single tall window with a working shutter, a writing table pushed into it, and a view straight down the roadstead to the ships waiting at anchor.
The bed is firm and unremarkable. The bathroom is small and entirely adequate. The window is the room, and the owners know it: the table is positioned for the view, there is a proper chair rather than a decorative one, and the lamp is on the correct side.
Somebody sat in this room, at this table, and worked out where the light comes from. That is most of what a hotel can do for you.
The noise, which is the catch
This is a working port. The ferry runs from six in the morning. The fish market operates before dawn and is loud. On weekday mornings there is machinery.
If you are a light sleeper, take one of the five rooms at the back, accept that you have given up the reason to be here, and sleep. If you are not, the noise resolves within a night into something closer to weather. We stopped noticing it on the second morning.
Eating
No restaurant, and the breakfast is the weak point: instant coffee, supermarket bread, jam in a plastic tub, served in a room with a television on. Skip it. Twelve minutes’ walk along the front there are five or six grill houses cooking the fish that came off the boats you are looking at, at prices that will strike most visitors as an error.
The house speciality along that strip is fried cuttlefish. Order it once and you will order it every night.
Value
This is the cheapest hotel we have written about in two years, and the value is not close. The rate for a water-facing room in April is roughly what a mid-range chain charges for a car park view in Lisbon, and the two experiences are not comparable.
The trade is real, though: no air conditioning, no service to speak of, no help with a booking, and an owner who is friendly but not available. You are renting a room and a window.
Verdict
Not a good hotel by the usual measures, and one of the best rooms we slept in all year. Book number 12, bring earplugs you probably will not use, and eat somewhere else.
