You can reserve a four season stay in Portugal and open the same room in four different months

What breaks, and what it costs

Two parts of the house shape go. Shoulder season goes first: two of these four weeks fall in the months the house shape is built to keep out of. The single arrival goes with it. Instead of eight nights unpacked into once, there are twenty eight nights unpacked into four times, in the same room, with roughly three months between each week. Neither arrangement is put forward here as the better one. They are different weeks with different contents, and the office is describing the difference rather than scoring it. Everything else holds. One base. A hire car. Roughly two hours from where you land. Out every day and back to the same bed. Two people. From $6,480, against $2,340 for the house shape. Per night that is $231 here and $293 there, and the lower figure is not being offered as an argument. What it reflects is a room held in months it is otherwise quiet. What it costs is four sets of your own flights instead of one, four car hires instead of one, and four separate blocks of leave. Those flights are yours to arrange and are not in the price. Cedar Passage arranges no flying and no sailing, and carries no carrier contract of any kind, and quotes the ground only: the room, the car, and the bookings made around them.

The room, and why it does not change

The base is a stone house on the edge of a village in the Reguengos de Monsaraz area, whitewashed, with a painted band of blue or ochre running round the foot of the outside walls the way most houses here are finished. The walls are about sixty centimetres thick. The floors are tile. There is a wood stove and there is no air conditioning, which matters in one of the four weeks and not in the other three. The reason for holding the same room four times is dull and practical. A first visit costs two days: where bread is sold and until what hour, which of the two roads out of the village is quicker at eight in the morning, which shop shuts on Monday, when the kitchen stops getting light. By the second week that is known and the days start whole. By the fourth there is a drawer you keep things in and a shopkeeper who has stopped asking where you are from. The room is not held empty between the weeks. It is booked four times, by date, as four bookings, and the office confirms each one in writing when the supplier does. Between your weeks other people sleep in it, which is why the four dates have to be fixed early rather than kept loose.

The four weeks, in order

March. The plain is green, which it is for about ten weeks a year and not at all in the pictures most people have seen of this country. Almond blossom is finishing, wild flowers are starting, storks are already back on the chimneys and the church towers. Days reach 17 to 19 degrees, nights drop to about 7, and two or three of the seven days will have rain in them. June. Long light. The sun sets after nine and the useful part of the day runs 07:00 to 11:30 and then 18:30 until dark. The middle belongs to the house. Mid thirties is ordinary. July and August in this part of the country run hotter again, often by five degrees or more and sometimes by ten, which is why the summer week sits in June. October. Brown, and staying brown. The grapes are in, and the clay pots the region ferments in are sealed and not opened until 11 November, so this week sees them shut rather than poured. Pigs go out to the acorns from about mid month. Days 22 to 25, nights around 11. January. The blunt one. 13 to 15 by day, 4 to 6 at night, sunset at 17:15, and a stone house with one stove is cold in a way a heated flat at the same reading is not. Rain arrives in blocks of days rather than showers. This is the week people ask to move.

The ground, and the driving

You land at Lisbon and drive about 150 kilometres, which is an hour and three quarters on a quiet morning and closer to two and a half on a Friday evening. The motorway east is tolled electronically only, with no booth to pay at, so the car needs a transponder fitted at pickup. Ask for it in the same sentence as the car rather than afterwards. Off the motorway the roads are single carriageway, 90 km/h, straight for long stretches and shared with tractors and farm lorries. Evora is 40 kilometres from the house, about 45 minutes. The marble towns north of it, where the quarries are cut down below the water table and stand full of green water, are around an hour. The stone circle west of Evora, roughly 95 standing stones raised long before Stonehenge, is reached by four kilometres of dirt track: fine in a small car in October, unpleasant after two days of January rain. The land between towns is oak pasture, thin grass under widely spaced trees, grazed rather than wild. East of the house the reservoir covers about 250 square kilometres. It was filled from 2002, so the shoreline is young and old road surfaces surface again when the level drops. The district is certified for its dark skies, and in January it is properly dark by half past five.

What the days actually consist of

Out every day and back to the same bed survives here, but what out means moves with the month. In March and October it is the ordinary version: leave at nine, one town or one site, eat where you land, back by six, evening in the house. June is different and it is worth saying so directly. From about eleven in the morning until half past six, nothing outdoors is any good, so the day splits in two and the middle of it is spent inside with the shutters closed. People who dislike an enforced afternoon indoors dislike this week in particular, and they usually know that about themselves in advance. January inverts it. The light is short, the working window is 09:30 to 17:00, so there is one thing in a day and not two. Museums and churches in the smaller towns run shorter winter hours and several close on Mondays out of season; the office sends the winter hours with the confirmation rather than the summer ones, because at the end of the day the two can differ by two hours. Across the four weeks that is roughly 28 days out, of which perhaps six will be lost to heat, rain or a closed door. Six is what the office plans for and what it says, rather than describing a year in which nothing goes wrong.

Four weeks in one district is not a first visit

It suits two people who already know they like one district and would rather watch it change than see four districts once. It suits anyone whose leave comes in short blocks and cannot be assembled into a fortnight. It suits people who read a landscape by return: the same track green, then glaring, then brown, then muddy, is a different exercise from four tracks seen once each. It does not suit a first visit to this country. Four weeks in one district is a poor way to find out whether you like Portugal at all, and the office will say so if that is what a request looks like. It does not suit anyone who needs a year settled and unchangeable twelve months out, because four bookings made that far ahead will move at least once. It does not suit a traveller who wants the summer week usable all day. On money. Nothing is paid to Cedar Passage at any point. A percentage reaches the office from the supplier after the stay, once the nights have actually been slept, and that is the whole of how it earns. No card details are taken here and there is no payment page on this site. Send the four windows you can hold and the office prices them as one request.

Awkward questions about this change

Will the office book the four flights?

No. Nothing that carries passengers is sold from this desk and no operator has an agreement with us, so the four return trips are yours to book, yours to pay for, and outside the $6,480. What the office does instead is fix the four sets of ground dates first and send them to you in writing, so that you buy tickets against nights already confirmed rather than the other way round. If a trip you have already bought has to move, tell the office and it will put the change to the supplier. Whether the room can follow is the supplier's answer, not the office's.

Can we take all four weeks in spring and autumn instead?

You can, but it stops being this trip and it is priced separately. The figure here rests on two of the four weeks falling in months the room is quiet, and four weeks spread across March, April, October and November do not do that; the quote comes back higher. The office is not saying either version is the better holiday. It is saying they cost different amounts for reasons that have nothing to do with what the weeks are like, and it will quote both side by side if you want to see the two numbers before deciding.

Is it definitely the same room every time?

It is booked as the same room, by number, four times, and each of the four is confirmed to you in writing. What the office cannot do is own the room. If maintenance, damage or a supplier error makes one of the four impossible, you will hear it from the office rather than at the door, and the replacement offered will be in the same house. That has happened once in the office's experience of repeat bookings of this kind, and it was the January week. Anyone for whom the identical room is the entire point should know that before committing to four dates.

Can we cancel one week and keep the other three?

Usually yes, because the four are four separate bookings with four separate deadlines, not one contract in four parts. The terms are the supplier's and they differ by season: the June week tends to have the longest notice period and the January week the shortest. The office sends all four deadlines on a single sheet when the bookings are confirmed, with the date each one hardens, so the calendar is in one place. Nothing is held on a card here, because no card details are taken here at any stage.

Is the January week worth going at all?

That is a judgement and the office will not make it for you, because the answer depends entirely on what you want from a week. What it will do is print the conditions in advance rather than after you have paid: 13 to 15 degrees by day, dark at 17:15, rain in blocks, one stove, and towns where several doors are shut for the season. Some people find that the week the place makes most sense, with nobody in it. Others get to Wednesday and want to drive somewhere warmer. Both reactions are common and neither is unusual enough to plan around.