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It seemed like a good idea at the time: a dawn getaway from Lisbon to evade the city’s morning commuter madness. But I hadn’t taken into account what happens when the rising sun hits the dew-soak of flat country. As soon as I dropped down to the great plains of Alentejo I ran into a wall of fog - a guaranteed jerk-awake when impatient Portuguese businessmen bound for the Algarve at 200 kph are tailgating you at whites-of-eyes distance.

I left the main highway as soon as I could, and got on to back roads where the cars drove less frantically and leather-faced farmers jogged along in horse-drawn carts. Soon the sun had whisked the mist away like a showman, revealing the Alentejo plains in their full spring pomp. A wide green landscape, dotted with the gnarly figures of cork oaks like thousands of bent old men. Neat stacks of harvested cork under the ringbarked trees, and drifts of wild flowers flooding the grasslands beyond with purple, yellow and white.

Alentejo forms the southern central belt of Portugal. Every sun-seeking holidaymaker who drives the three hours south from Lisbon to the Algarve passes through Alentejo. Few spare the countryside more than a glance and a yawn, however, because the Algarve highway happens to traverse the flattest and dullest part of the region.

To get to know the unfrequented highlands, the rolling hills, the medieval hilltop towns and the wild empty beaches of one of the least developed rural regions of Europe, travellers have to get away from the main holiday road. You also need to wind down by several notches, especially if you are still running on city time. Things go a whole lot more slowly in Alentejo.

By three o’clock that afternoon, idling on a green pathway in the company of Tuke Taylor and watching a farmer mow a flower-rich hay meadow, I felt a long, long way from Lisbon. "Hear the nightingale?" Tuke held up a finger, listening. ‘Somewhere in those woods, but they’re hard birds to spot.’ The hollow, fluting song poured between the cork oaks, as rich as honey. "They’ll probably keep you awake tonight," said Tuke, "singing in the eucalyptus behind your cottage." That was a prospect I could face with equanimity.

Staying self-catering in upcountry Alentejo, you soon pick up the laid-back lifestyle. My hosts Tuke and Sophie Taylor came to Alentejo from England a dozen years ago, and fell in love with the gently hilly country around São Luis a few miles back from the coast.

The Taylors’ house stands alongside their guest cottage, built of traditional mud blocks by Tuke, in a suntrap garden so full of flowers and birdsong that lazier guests have been known to spend their entire holidays flat out in a deckchair there. But Sophie knows where to send horse riders for long days in the hills, while Tuke keeps the map of a dozen remote country walking trails in his head. "You can walk here from October through to June," he told me. "Only the summer months are too hot to move around on foot."

We strolled on, past empty hamlets and farmsteads abandoned during the inexorable drift of young Alentejans from the land to the bright lights of the cities. Back-country Alentejo remains poor and undeveloped, its economy rural, its agriculture old-fashioned. Hence the profusion of wild flowers in spring, the joyful birdsong from every thicket, and the wonderful peace and quiet of the countryside.

Next morning I set out to explore the Alentejo coast. Seventy miles of beach and cliff are marred by only one eyesore - Sines, birth place of explorer Vasco de Gama, with its clutch of monstrous, flaring oil refineries. There is one small resort, Vila Nova de Milfontes. Otherwise the sands are clean, the rough-edged roads quiet, and the settlements tiny. This absence of development blight is due to the geography of the Alentejo coast. The Atlantic ocean here is colder and rougher than on the Algarve, so these west-facing beaches see comparatively few visitors.

At Odeceixe in the south the River Seixe broadened through sandbars to meet the sea between high rocky headlands. A great tongue of sheltered sand spread across the bay, with - quite literally - one man and his dog on it. Out near the lighthouse at Cabo Sardão the cliffs were smothered in mesembryanthemum, sherbet-yellow flowers in tangles of fleshy leaves. I stood a long while with my binoculars, watching storks in their straggly stick nests out on inaccessible pinnacles and ledges. The fluffy white chicks had hatched the previous month, and the parents came gliding in to flap down on the nests with goodies crammed into their dagger-shaped scarlet bills.

All day I worked slowly northwards up the coast. At Praiha da Ilha I sat dozing in the shadow of a stark stone medieval fort, looking across blue-green sea to the outline of another fort on the Ilha do Pessegeiro, Peach Tree Island. Up at the lagoon of São André, returning late in the afternoon from a long walk through the dunes, I saw a girl dive from a canoe, a solitary figure that arced gracefully into the sun-silvered water with hardly a splash.

"Come in, you are welcome," said Antonio Menezes, smiling at the door of Monte Cabeço do Ouro that evening. "Tonight we eat at a restaurant? Not fancy place, but the fish is ... mmm ..." and he tugged one earlobe in a very Portuguese gesture of maximum approval.

Antonio and his wife Kika are exponents of agro-turismo, putting guests up at their tiny ridge-top farm. The Menezes offer boating, riding and hiking, but mainly a tremendous and natural hospitality. "Here don’t to lock the door," admonished Kika when she saw me about to do so. "Here is no crime."

We bucketed down into town in the family van. In the big, simply-furnished restaurant I was the only non-local. The salted flatfish we ate was indeed earlobe-tuggingly good. So was the crisp vinho verde that went with it.

The following day I drove east into upcountry Alentejo along avenues of eucalyptus and pine. Arriving in the ancient regional capital of Evora, I peeped into the Igreja de São Francisco to find a solemn-faced youth in the act of exchanging rings with his dark-haired bride. The applause of the wedding party echoed like gunshot around the vaulted church.

When they had left I went in to see the Capela dos Ossos, a chapel walled with the dully-glinting bones and skulls of more than 5,000 medieval monks. "We bones that lie here are waiting for your bones," announced the grimly realistic inscription at the entrance. Displayed here were tresses of hair offered as tokens of virginity and for good luck by former generations of Alentejo bridges, but none groomed or glossy enough to have belonged to the young woman who had just plighted her troth in the church.

I went to sit down out of the sun with my back against the cool blue tiles of the University’s arcaded courtyard. The student who chatted to me there wore fashionable Ray-Bans and carried an armful of computer disks. The peasant I had seen on my way to Evora that morning, trudging a field behind a hand-plough drawn by a pair of bullocks, might have been his father. But there was no gauge wide enough to measure the difference between that simple farmer's generation of Alentejans and this young man’s.

Towards dusk I came to Monsaraz, tightly huddled as if for a film set at the crest of a hill near the Spanish border. Ninho das Aiguias, the Eagle’s Nest, the locals call it: a few streets of whitewashed houses lined with ancient arched stone doorways, some of which must have been standing when the Moors of North Africa ruled Portugal a thousand years ago. After the Knights Templar ousted the Moors from Monsaraz in 1167, they drew a belt of defensive stone walls tightly around the little town.

There was just time tonight, before the light failed, to walk a circuit of the fortifications. Somewhere among the white houses a man sang mournfully. I trod the rough stones of the walls, gazing out across the plains as they cooled and began to fill with the evening’s mist, hazy and blue.

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