In defence of the places no one has written a newsletter about yet.
There is a village in the Alentejo — I will not name it, because the naming is the problem — where I have spent parts of four different years. It has a square, a church, a café that serves two things, and a bakery that opens at seven and sells out by nine.
It does not have a boutique hotel. It does not have a restaurant with a website. The accommodation is a room above the café, rented by the week, with a window that looks onto the square.
I first went because a friend had been, years before, and told me about it with the particular enthusiasm of someone who wants to share something but also, slightly, does not. I understood this after my first visit. You want people to know it exists. You do not want to be responsible for what happens next.
The villages that survive on being undiscovered have a specific quality to them. People who live there are there because they want to be. The food is made for them, not for visitors. The pace is the pace of the place, not of anyone's holiday expectations.