When Americans start thinking about a longer stay abroad, Portugal tends to come up first, and usually it’s Lisbon or Porto. A month in either costs less than most of Western Europe. The weather is mild for much of the year. Portugal’s long-stay visa is one of the easier ones for a retiree or remote worker to qualify for; the cities are made for walking, and plenty of people speak English.

Their popularity is the catch. Lisbon and Porto are filling with other long-stay visitors who reached the same conclusion. The popular lookout points now draw crowds, and the apartments worth renting book months in advance.

As you get away from Lisbon, the crowds thin out. This is the Alentejo, Portugal’s wide, rural interior, and its capital, Évora, is where we would send you instead.

The town

Évora is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. A Roman temple from the first century stands a short walk from a twelfth-century Gothic cathedral, with sixteenth-century mansions and a long stone aqueduct in the streets between them. It is also a university town, home to one of Portugal’s oldest universities, so it stays busy year-round and does not empty out between tour seasons.

The center is small, and you can cross it on foot. You learn it in a few days. Within a couple of weeks, you know your way around and have places you go back to. That kind of familiarity is the point of a long stay, and Évora still has room for it while the big cities are filling up.

The table and the land

The Alentejo is wine and farm country. It grows more than a tenth of Portugal’s vines, and the reds are good and still underpriced. The food is simple and local: black pork, sheep’s-milk cheese from around Évora, seafood stews, bread and olives from nearby. Many wine estates take visitors in the afternoon. Between the towns, the land is covered with cork oak, olive groves, and open fields.

The Alentejo draws a fraction of the visitors that the coastal Algarve does, though Alqueva Lake alone has a longer shoreline than the entire Portuguese coast. The roads stay quiet, even at night. Guesthouses and apartments rent by the week and by the month, set up for people who plan to stay a while.

The sky

Évora sits about ninety minutes from Lisbon by road or rail, so it works as a base for the rest of the region.

The land around the Alqueva Lake was named the world’s first Starlight Tourism Destination in 2011. The nearby towns dim their street lighting after dark to protect it, and the skies stay clear for more than 250 nights a year. Stand outside after dinner, and you’ll see the Milky Way overhead.