Home Tour:
Vill’Alcina

Drive an hour north from Porto and the landscape becomes hilly. As I head toward the town of Caminha, the road winds into the valleys, while waves crash onto the shores of the vast ocean stretching out to the left. We’re by Portugal’s border with the Spanish region of Galicia, whose Santa Tecla mountain rises tall across the bay.

When the architect Sergio Fernandez acquired a patch of land here, on a hillside overlooking the mouth of the Minho river, there were no homes nearby. It was the early 1970s, and he built two identical houses side by side, one for himself and another for the friend with whom he had purchased the plot. “I wanted it to be similar to the land, ” explains Fernandez, who has driven me from Porto to his mountain retreat. At 85,