Ventozelo Hotel & Quinta, Douro

The marketers decided to call Ventozelo Hotel & Quinta a “place where time stops…where you can hear the silence and see the stars.” That’s really not a bad description. The quietly beautiful property in the Douro Valley is a deeply peaceful retreat.

And they play up the Quinta in the name, to emphasize that for all the luxury trappings, it’s still a historic farm focused on producing excellent wines and maintaining countryside traditions.

Opened in 2020, Ventozelo has 29 rooms spread across 7 buildings, a restaurant, a wine-tasting setup (currently in a garden of orange trees), a visitor center and plenty of walking trails through the vineyards and into wild nature. It’s all polished, but none of it is aggressively slick. Rather, it still feels like a farm where good old-fashioned hospitality is extended to everyone.

The former mess hall for the vineyard workers of past generations now functions as the hotel restaurant, serving a fancified regional cuisine from the Douro Valley and Trás-os-Montes, according to a “zero kilometers” concept. That means vegetables, fruit and olive oil from the farm, and regional PDO products from nearby suppliers, such as Maronesa meat. Esteemed chef Miguel Castro e Silva says his aim is to revive the practices of the past (but with some newer techniques) and to tell a story.