The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are rumoured to have bought a European holiday home in Portugal in an upmarket coastal district around an hour south of Lisbon.

The Comporta region of the Alentejo has been dubbed ‘the Hamptons of Western Europe’ after the seaside resorts on Long Island favoured by the New York jet-set and made famous by F Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are said to have fallen for the area when they visited Princess Eugenie and her husband Jack Brooksbank in 2023. Other famous admirers of Comporta include George and Amal Clooney and Madonna.This pricey strip of Atlantic coastline is also home to European high-fliers such as former French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, the Italian-French supermodel Carla Bruni, the Italian actress Monica Belluci and the French fashion designer Christian Louboutin.

But scratch below the glitzy, sun-kissed surface and the story of Comporta takes on an altogether darker hue. The Herdade da Comporta (Estate of Comporta) was originally a vast agricultural estate, dating back to the 12th century.

It was renowned throughout Portugal for its rice production, as well as its salt works and its fishing villages. The Herdade was formally constituted in 1836 but more than 150 years later it began a new lease of life.

The Espirito Santo banking family owned the land and recognised the potential in this beautiful, unspoilt landscape, as they began to market it as a summer destination for European royalty and the continent’s super-rich.

However, it all fell apart when Portugal’s central bank had to rescue the Banco Espirito Santo in 2014 at a cost to the taxpayer of 8 billion euros in what Reuters described as “one of Europe’s biggest corporate collapses ever”. An investigation later uncovered “wilful acts of ruinous management” by the bank’s bosses.

They included Ricardo Salgado, the heir to the banking dynasty, who later faced charges for money-laundering and corruption. He was dubbed ‘DDT’, standing for ‘Dono Disto Tudo’ or ‘Owner of All This’. In June 2024, he was sentenced to six years in prison in relation to the Operation Marquis corruption case.

Meanwhile, the trial dealing with the biggest banking scandal in Portuguese history has begun in Lisbon this month with Salgado as the main defendant as the authorities finally prosecute the collapse of the bank itself. It involves investigations in at least six countries – Portugal, Switzerland, Venezuala, Luxembourg, Panama and Angola. According to a report by Euromoney, Salgado is now known in Lisbon as ‘Europe’s Madoff’.When the bank was bailed out in 2014, the authorities ordered Banco Espirito Santo to put the Herdade up for sale and around 1380 hectares was eventually purchased five years later by Portuguese tycoon Paula Amorim and French magnate Claude Berda. The agricultural part of the estate was not included in the sale.

They announced plans for development projects worth 1.5billion euros… and the Hamptons of Western Europe now looks set to soar on to a bright new future as a holiday hotspot for the global elite, far removed from the area’s long history as a peaceful and idyllic agricultural backwater.