Longevity Senses Cascais

Ask by name for a Deluxe Room with Partial Sea View and Garden Access. It opens straight onto the gardens and the fountain, so the saltwater pool and the spa are a barefoot walk, and the pines frame a slice of sea; the balcony rooms upstairs have the fuller view and none of the door.

The clinic opens at eight in the morning and the spa at ten, and that order says most of what matters here. Longevity Senses Cascais is a clinic with a hotel around it, three low buildings and 39 rooms on the Avenida Nossa Senhora do Cabo between the village of Cascais and the dunes of Guincho, adults only, with a saltwater pool and a jacuzzi in a garden that runs down to the sea and a gym glassed in beside them so that a treadmill looks at the Atlantic. The group's first house stands on the Algarve; this is its second in Portugal, and the Atlantic one.

Five room categories, two guests at most in each. The Premium Suite, 50 square metres with a living room and three private balconies with sun loungers, is the one to ask for if the sea is the point; the Premium Room at 30 square metres gives the same view from a single balcony. The Deluxe rooms are 22 to 25 square metres, with a terrace or a balcony and, in one category, a door straight onto the gardens. The rooms are the quiet part of the place: classic Portuguese furniture and curtains that shut out the light, with the sea or the pines in the window depending on what you paid. Members book them at rates we hold for the Club.

Sea Senses by Longevity is the restaurant, open to the Atlantic, with fish and seafood from this coast cooked in the lighter Mediterranean way and dinner served until ten. The cooking is good and it is not the reason to cross Portugal. From June to September the Pool Bar takes over the garden from midday. Guests on a programme eat from the wellness plan instead, which can be full board with juices and teas between meals, or, on the detox weeks, meals that arrive liquid, semi-liquid or solid as the week decides.

The programmes are the reason. The house sorts everything it does into five Senses, Medical, Body, Dietetic, Serenity and Aesthetic, and builds the stays from them: the Touch of Longevity over two to four nights with a Healing Dome session and a massage, the Essence over three, five or seven with a medical consultation and osteopathy, and the Art of Longevity over seven or fourteen with lab diagnostics, hydrogen water, Papimi and the TESLAChair. Every inclusion is printed treatment by treatment, which is more candour than most wellness hotels manage. The spa circuit of sauna, hammam, ice fountain, sensory showers and a heated indoor hydropool is free to every guest, programme or not.

It suits a traveller who wants to be told, kindly and by a doctor, what to do with a week, and a couple who want Cascais and Guincho at the end of a quiet road with no children at the pool. It will not suit anyone who wants the hotel to be the entertainment. At dusk the pines along the avenue go dark a good while before the water does, and the pool holds the last of the light.