Portugal's sleepy southwestern shore is Europe's newest coastal preserve— two hundred thousand unspoiled acres zoned to stay that way. Here, just three hours from Lisbon, time itself seems to have stopped for a siesta. Amy Engeler gets back to basics

An old wire fence was all that stood between us. The pig was on my tail, catching up faster than I'd like to admit, and outweighing me by at least a hundred pounds. I never knew pigs could run or wear a leash like a dog. But in Portugal's southern Alentejo region, farmland since Roman times, the old ways are still alive. Without a better idea, I stopped and stared at the pig, and it skidded to a stop, disappointed, raising its snout to me. The game was over, and onward I went, until the road ended at a precipice high over the Atlantic. Looking down the coast, I saw cliff after black cliff, sandy beaches tucked between—a giant zigzag cut into the land, all within the boundaries of Europe's longest and newest coastal reserve, Southwest Alentejo and Costa Vicentina Natural Park. More than 200,000 acres of private and public lands are under severe building restrictions meant to keep the coastline rustic, wild, and suspended in time.

Some say this casual mix of farmland and beaches less than three hours from Lisbon is like the southern Algarve fifty years ago, or Long Island before the potato fields became second homes. There is no highway—just a winding road with harrowing passing zones—no car dealerships or fast food, no resorts, and only 24,000 people scattered over sixty miles of coastline. As I sat on the dunes, careful to miss the burrs and the succulent flowering plants, lost in the rhythm of the waves, a fisherman in a wet suit and carrying a speargun appeared from a thicket of bushes, coming up the steep path from the ocean. "Bom dia." He nodded in the quiet way of the Alentejo, tucked his bucket into the back of his dusty truck, and drove off.

We'd found our way to this corner of Portugal, still half in the last century, because of Rosa, my Portuguese sister-in-law, who married my brother three years ago in Brussels. Rosa is full of fun, her impeccable English sprinkled with curse words, but she is often contradictory, particularly about the country she left twenty-five years ago, as a teenager. To her, Portugal is infuriating as well as seductive, backward as well as visionary. Despite this torrent of crossed signals, we all signed on to her proposed Portuguese vacation—my parents, sister, and our families, thirteen people in all. Our destination, Rosa explained, was the Alentejo (pronounced a-lan-TEZSH), a mostly treeless region unlike the rest of Portugal, very authentic, and popular among her Lisbon friends. I couldn't find Odeceixe (pronounced o-da-SAYSH) or Zambujeira do Mar in my world atlas; there wasn't much in the guidebooks, either. Even a Portuguese travel agent, born in Porto and now living in New York, looked at me perplexed. "Never been there," he said with a shake of his head.

Signs seemed unnecessary at the Alentejo border. The green hills south of Lisbon flipped abruptly golden brown, scorched like an African prairie, as if someone had just flipped the rainwater switch to off. In this exotic open landscape, with the big sky and the long distance to the horizon interrupted only by a scattering of trees, it was hard to remember that we were still in Europe. These were cork oaks, a cousin of the live oaks of the American South, with wild, gnarly branches and red trunks stripped of their bark, which is used to make the millions of wine corks the Alentejo exports each year. Every so often, a field of sunflowers, grown for the seed oil, announced an upcoming village, whitewashed and perched on a hill.