An Orange Orchard Outside Faro Is Becoming Eleven Villas Valued at More Than Three Million Euros Each
Neel Sachdev, who runs Paul Weiss in London, paid 1.5 million euros for the land at Santa Barbara de Nexe and expects the Algarve to become the California of Europe. Portuguese house prices rose 17.8 percent in the year to the first quarter, against an EU average of 5.1 percent.
Santa Bárbara de Nexe is an inland parish of the Faro municipality, a few kilometres up from the coast road, with 4,379 residents at the 2021 census. It is not where the Algarve's headline money has historically gone. One of its orange orchards was bought for 1.5 million euros, and eleven houses are now going up on it, each valued this year at more than three million.
The buyer is Neel Sachdev, global vice-chair of the American law firm Paul Weiss and head of its London office. He told the Financial Times, in an account reported this weekend by the business daily ECO, that he expects the region to become "the California of Europe". One house is finished. The other ten are at different stages, with completion due by 2028. Each has a pool.
How the deal is put together
The structure is worth reading carefully, because it is not the usual international-developer model. Sachdev is in partnership with a property investor he met when the two of them lived in Hackney, in east London, and that partner runs the site day to day. The builders, architects and interior designers hired for the project are Portuguese. This is foreign capital and local execution, rather than a foreign firm importing a delivery chain.
Sachdev is a private equity lawyer by trade. He moved to Paul Weiss from Kirkland & Ellis in 2023 and has taken the firm's London office from roughly fifteen lawyers to 275, during the years in which American firms have been buying their way into the London market. His reasoning on Portugal, as reported, rests on the country's openness to foreign investment and on rising international demand. Knight Frank, quoted in the same account, said the supply of detached villas in the Algarve remains below demand, and particularly so in peripheral areas that still have room to appreciate.
The number behind the number
The arithmetic is blunt. Land at 1.5 million euros becomes eleven houses carrying a combined valuation above 33 million. That spread is the whole thesis, and it only works if the buyers are not shopping on the coastal strip.
The national backdrop explains why anyone would underwrite it. On Eurostat's house price index, Portuguese house prices rose 17.8 percent in the year to the first quarter of 2026, against an EU average of 5.1 percent. That was not a one-quarter spike: the Portuguese figure has run above 11 percent every quarter since the end of 2024 and peaked at 18.9 percent in the final quarter of last year. A developer making a bet in 2024 on land that completes in 2028 has had the market move in their favour for the whole intervening period.
What is genuinely new here is the address. Our reporting in June found that American buyers had taken the lead in Portugal's luxury property market, with Cascais overtaking Lisbon at the top end. The Santa Bárbara de Nexe project is the same current reaching a different kind of place: not a resort, not a marina, but farmland in a parish of a few thousand people, ten minutes from Faro airport.
For anyone living in the Algarve interior, that is the part that matters. The premium the coast has carried for fifty years is what has kept the hills affordable. Eleven villas at three million euros each, on ground that grew oranges until recently, is a fairly precise measure of how much of that gap is left.
