There are now two championship courses in the region, one at Praia D’El Rey and one at CampoReal, and plans for two more. The Portuguese Open has also been earmarked for the greater Lisbon area for the next three years. So could the Oeste become the next Algarve? Not if Telmo Faria, Obidos’ young and forward-thinking mayor, who has just been re-elected with 70% of the vote, has anything to do with it.

()“I get two or three investors a month knocking at the door trying to build,” he says. “But we don’t want lots of resorts. We don’t want to be like the Algarve.

“We want investors to make a fortune, but if the road they choose to make money is just selling houses and thinking of euros per square metre, then we’re not interested. We want something more visionary.”

With plans to open a second airport at Ota — just 20 minutes from Obidos — in the next six years, the temptation to build will be very strong.

However, the Portuguese government has recently introduced tough environmental and planning legislation, with a view to preventing the unrestricted building that has destroyed much of the Spanish coastline and has affected the Algarve, too.

Under the new guidelines, a big resort such as Praia D’El Rey would not now be given planning permission.

The latest project to be given the green light is Bom Sucesso, a 400-acre site behind the Obidos lagoon, Portugal’s largest natural lake. On the site of an old farm, six miles from Obidos, 14 of Portugal’s top architects, including Eduardo Souto de Moura and Alvaro Siza, who designed this year’s summer pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery, have contributed to what the developers call “the world’s first minimalist design resort”.

At the moment, the £170m project resembles a dusty moonscape, but when it is completed in 2007, there will be 600 properties — all vast swathes of glass — built around a championship golf course.

“We are selling art,” says Goncalo Castelo Branco, sales director of Bom Sucesso. “Each home is like a work of art.”

The site’s natural gradients will be used to screen houses from each other and to optimise views, and each house will have a grass-covered roof. The developers plan to plant 10,000 trees on the site and promise the added convenience of a helipad. The second phase, yet to launch, will include six villas designed by English architect David Chipperfield, most famous for his rowing musuem at Henley-on-Thames.

It is a spectacular project. Ultra- modern in style, rather like Californian condos in the Portuguese hills, they are holiday homes in which you will want to display your Eames chairs and Le Corbusier-style recliners.

Further inland, set in wooded hills, is the more traditional CampoReal Golf and Spa Resort, which will have up to 372 units including villa plots, town houses and apartments. The project is the brainchild of Eduardo Netto de Almeida, a local businessman and keen horseman.

Roy and Petrina Foreman sold their villa in the La Manga Club in Murcia, Spain, in the early 1990s, and have reinvested in a house on a golf resort in Cyprus and a four-bed town house at CampoReal. They bought the property off-plan 18 months ago — it will be ready in June 2006 — for £156,000. Prices for a four-bed town house now start at £210,000.

“We love the idea of being close to Lisbon, and towns such as Estoril and Cascais,” says Roy, a lawyer from Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire. “We can go to a football game or the Grand Prix, but, at the same time, we’re in the real Portugal — nothing is anglicised.”

“I play golf, but badly,” admits Roy. “I see a golf course as a safer bet for an investment. I may also get to practise.”

So what is CampoReal’s developer, Netto de Almeida’s, handicap? “I don’t play golf,” he grins. “It’s just business.”

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