Braciosa, a vacation home rental in Portugal

Country Living among Portugal's Cork Trees

Located near Coruche, just over an hour from Lisbon, this country property by Almeida Fernandes Arquitectura is comprised of a house and guest suite, with four bedrooms in total, and a swimming pool in its wild garden. A queen bedroom and convertible twin room occupy the main house alongside an open living area with a fireplace, and a kitchen and dining area with seating for eight. Upstairs, a children’s room offers four single beds. The guest suite, a separate structure adjacent to the home, offers room for two.

Outdoors, the pool and patios offer wide views of the surrounding countryside, dotted with woods of pine and cork oak. A living zone has a kitchen and barbecue along with a dining table.

Around

This home is located in the heart of Ribatejo, near the town of Coruche, the world capital of cork production. Just an hour and 15 minutes from Lisbon, it is a place to reconnect with nature and savor a quieter, slower country life. Cyclists, equestrians and walkers can take to the forested trails near the property, and there’s canoeing and kayaking on the River Sorraia as well as water activities such as wake boarding and water skiing. Bird lovers come to the area for its variety of species, and wine lovers can tour the region’s small producers who cap their bottles with the harvest from twisting local cork oak trees.

Capped by red-tiled roofs, the buildings in Coruche offer a glimpse of a typical regional town. The town is set in a fertile alluvial plain, home to the Sorraia River, along which rice fields and smaller plots of corn and tomatoes extend. The cork oak forest is unique to the region, its trees’ renewable bark supplying some five million corks to world per day. A Cork Observatory describes the local trade, and is a one-of-a-kind building clad entirely in cork inside and out.