UK newspaper trumpets Cascais and Estoril as the new Hamptons

Seven years ago the travel sections of US newspapers hailed Portugal’s Alentejo district of Comporta as the new Hamptons.

Now the UK’s Telegraph has dubbed Estoril and Cascais as the “new Hamptons” that are attracting a new wave of European A-listers.
Drawing on the resorts’ glamorous royal past in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as the playground of the Portuguese aristocracy and exiled European monarchs, it states that after a period of neglect, the Estoril Coast was regenerated to 2011 and today “hosts numerous foreign heads of state, as well as Charles III when he was Prince of Wales”.
The article discusses Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa’s meetings and daily swims in the area, the glamorous party life of the Palacio Estoril Hotel in the 1930s with spying across the bar during the war in the 1940s, and its inspiration for Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale after Estoril Casino opened nearby in 1931.
It mentions the foreign royalty who lived there at various periods from the 1940s to the 1970s and included the Duke of Windsor and King Umberto II of Italy. (Juan Carlos of Spain also grew up in the vicinity)
“Not wishing to rest on its elegant laurels, Cascais is getting a new lease of life, with fresh hotel openings and buzzy, contemporary restaurants spilling out onto cobbled streets. French architect Philippe Starck is a resident, and English can increasingly be heard as much as Portuguese as you push your way through the chic crowds, cocktails clinking, as dusk falls. It seems this stretch of coast, 150 years on, hasn’t lost its pulling power”, the article states.

Photo of Estoril seafront: Wikipedia