ON SITE Adam Lawrence visits the new Ombria resort, the first golf to be built on Portugal’s Algarve for almost ten years A course of two halves OMBRIA RESORT, PORTUGAL 68 Spain and Portugal, Europe’s two traditional top golf tourism destinations, have had a tough time of it in the ten years since the great recession. Though surprisingly few courses seem to have actually closed, the pace of development in both countries has slowed to a snail’s pace. The ‘new Valderrama’ course, first mooted well over a decade ago, has still not come to fruition, and in Portugal, the most recent opening, Cynthia Dye’s West Cliffs north of Lisbon, finally made its bow last year after a fourteen-year gestation period. There has not been a new development on the Algarve since the Amedoeira resort, fully ten years ago, and Portugal’s highest profile recent golf project, David McLay Kidd’s Comporta course, went into liquidation after the downfall of the Espiritu Santu banking family, its developers and for decades the country’s richest clan.
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