Loulé

LOULÉ, 18km inland of Faro, has always been an important market town and has recently grown to a fair size, though its compact centre doesn’t take long to look around. Its most interesting streets, a grid of whitewashed cobbled lanes, lie between the remains of its Moorish castle (now a museum housing a range of Roman, Moorish and early Portuguese finds from Loulé and the surrounding area) and the thirteenth-century Gothic Igreja Matriz, with its palm-lined gardens in front.