Twelfth night does not move, so reserve eight nights on the Alentejo plain in January

A room, a car and your own flights are an evening's work at your own screen, and that is most of these eight nights. What is left is the sixth of January. Ask us to reserve eight nights on the Alentejo plain in January and the single thing you are buying is a house held across that date rather than turned over on the fifth.

• Whatever is agreed comes back to you in writing from the supplier, before any money moves.
• No card is asked for on this site and none is stored: the supplier takes payment on its own terms.
• A request sent through the form is answered in writing within one working day.

An evening at your own screen gets you most of this

Here is the number this page is sorted on. Of these eight nights, most of it you could arrange yourself, and in about an evening. A farmhouse room on the plain is listed in the ordinary places, in English, with a card form at the end of it. A hire car out of the airport is twenty minutes of typing. Your own flights are yours and we do not touch them. If you stopped reading now and did it that way, you would end up in roughly the same house on roughly the same night, and the supplier would simply keep the commission it would otherwise have paid us.

What is left is small, and it is the sixth of January. The parts of that evening worth being present for are not published anywhere at all. They are settled in the preceding week by people who telephone each other, and none of it is aimed at visitors. So we call the house, ask the owner what the villages nearby are doing, and ask for the sixth to be held rather than turned over on the fifth to a new arrival. That is the whole of our contribution to this week. If it is not worth a commission to you, reserve it yourself and we will not mind.

The plain, and what January does to it

The Alentejo is the ground south of the Tagus, roughly a third of Portugal carrying about a twentieth of its people. It is not flat the way a table is flat; it rolls in long slow swells, and from any rise you see fifteen or twenty kilometers of stubble, winter cover crop and widely spaced cork and holm oaks standing in their own shade. Whitewashed farmhouses sit one to a hill, a kilometer or two apart.

In January the daytime figure around Evora sits near 14C and the night near 6C. Rain falls on about eleven days in the month and totals somewhere near 80 mm, usually in two or three hard afternoons rather than a steady gray. Mornings start under fog lying in the hollows until nine or ten. On the sixth the sun is up about ten minutes before eight and gone by half past five, which leaves nine and a half usable hours.

The part nobody warns you about is indoors. Old lime and stone houses here were built to keep July out, not January, and central heating is uncommon. The fireplace is the heating. A bedroom can read 13C at eight in the morning and be comfortable by nine with the shutters open and sun on the wall. Bring the jersey you would wear at a bus stop, not the one you would wear to dinner.

The fifth and the sixth

Twelfth night on the plain is not a spectacle and nobody has organized it for you. In the first days of January small groups go from door to door in the villages singing the Reis, which is in plain terms a request for wine, sausage and a place by the fire, and it is generally granted. The singing is often cante alentejano, two parts and no instruments. One voice sets the line, a second answers above it, and the rest of the group comes in underneath. It is slow and loud and sits closer to a wall of sound than to a performance. Most groups belong to a village society and rehearse in a hall with strip lights and stacking chairs.

The sixth is not a public holiday in Portugal, so the shops open as normal, but the cake survives. Bolo rei is a ring of yeasted dough under candied fruit with a dried fava bean baked into it, and whoever bites the bean buys the cake the following year. Bakeries stop making it on the sixth and the shelves are bare on the seventh.

We cannot sell you an evening of this and we will not pretend to. What we can do is ask the house, a week ahead, which villages are singing and roughly when, and ask that somebody says so at supper on the fifth.

Eight days from one bed

One bed for eight nights means every day is out and back, and the distances are honest. From a base near Evora it is 22 km to the carpet town of Arraiolos, 46 km to Estremoz, 55 km to Monsaraz on its ridge above the Alqueva water, 60 km to the marble pits at Vila Vicosa where the working faces drop two hundred meters and stand full of pale green water, and 78 km south to Beja. The roads are two lanes and empty. You will rarely queue behind anything but a tractor.

Fixed points in the week: estremoz holds its market on the Rossio on Saturday morning, pottery at one end and cabbages at the other, thinning out by one o'clock. Municipal museums close on Mondays. Some village kitchens take their annual holiday in the first fortnight of January, which is one reason the house cooks twice.

Two things belong to this season and not to others. The clay amphora cellars south of Vidigueira broach their vessels in November and pour until each one runs dry, which lands somewhere in February. And there is very little light on the ground for forty kilometers around the reservoir, so when the moon is out of the way the sky is worth standing under at seven in the evening rather than at midnight. We will tell you what the moon is doing in your year before you reserve.

The number, and who it is wrong for

From $1,980 per person, about $248 per person per night. It covers the room for eight nights, breakfast every morning and two dinners at the house, one of them on the fifth. It does not cover the car, lunches, the other six dinners, or your flights, which stay in your hands. Etre Super Travel is an independent agency in Kansas City. Nobody here flies anything, keeps a bed, runs a ship or leads a tour, and no company that does has any stake in this desk. No money is taken here and no card details are held; the supplier settles with you at its end, on its own paperwork, and pays us afterwards for having made the introduction. The figure above is a starting point and the final one is confirmed when the reservation is made.

This suits two people content to spend an evening in a room with a fire and a paperback, who will drive forty minutes for lunch and forty back, and who do not need the week to have a program.

It does not suit anyone hoping to swim, since nothing warm happens outdoors in January. It does not suit four friends, because the price above is one bed. And it does not suit anyone who needs the week to be certain: the singing may not happen within twenty kilometers of the house, the fog may not lift on the seventh, and we will not tell you otherwise in advance.