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Essential Algarve Magazine celebrates 25th anniver...

Essential Algarve Magazine celebrates 25th anniversary!

25 Years Essential Algarve


Open Media CEO Bruce Hawker reflects on 25 years of the group’s flagship magazine, from its debut in 2000 to the present day

When our Essential magazine concept was born back in 2000, I never had any intention of taking it beyond the Algarve. At the time, there was a yawning chasm in the market for a luxury lifestyle magazine and having been in the publishing business here in the Algarve since the 1980s, the opportunity was clear to see.

We started out with Essential Algarve as a bilingual magazine in English and German, serving the two main language requirements of visiting tourists and the expat community at the time.

A few years later, when the idea emerged to launch a Lisbon edition, we decided to change German for Portuguese. This was soon followed by an edition for Madeira Island with a local partner.

Over the years leading up to the financial crises starting in 2008, the magazines grew both in size and stature to become recognised, as they are today, as a reference in the Portuguese luxury lifestyle media business.

In 2011, we took our first truly international step. I say “truly” as we had already had a forage into the Republic of Ireland back in 2007 with the launch of Essential Portugal Irish edition. This had been a huge success, launched with a self-funded national TV campaign and on sale nationally, with free distribution at golf clubs around Dublin and Cork. This was at a time when Irish tourism was booming in the Algarve, and it was one of the largest markets for real estate.

Around the same time, the Russian market was also seeing strong growth and we decided to address the niche with a one-off Russian-language edition.

Exploring new markets is in our DNA and, in 2011, we found our first international joint-venture partner in Macau, China, and launched Essential Macau, a bilingual magazine in Chinese and English aimed at the well-heeled Chinese visiting Macau for gambling and luxury shopping. The magazine was a runaway success and spurned the launch of other joint-venture editions in Malaysia and the Philippines.

We then decided to launch a London edition, in Chinese, targeting the wealthy Chinese visiting the UK capital at the time for shopping, and three very successful editions were produced.

These international editions eventually fizzled out at a time when the appetite for print media in Asia was waning, but it was a successful foray for us into international markets that paved the way for future projects.

In 2018, we launched Essential Business, out of our Lisbon office. This project was later taken on, together with Essential Lisboa and Essential Madeira, by the same business partners who had originally launched Essential Madeira with us.

Fast forward to this decade, and having survived Covid, in 2022 we launched a project that has reshaped our business, the Living in the Algarve and Living in Portugal seminar roadshows. Today, we hold events both here in Portugal and around the world, at which special editions of Essential Algarve are distributed, with individual front covers under the “Essential Portugal” title.

The Essential Algarve magazine has continued to grow and develop over recent years, in print as well as online, and to mark our 25th anniversary, we will be publishing our first edition of 2025 (February/March) with a new look and feel, ready to take on the challenges that lay ahead.

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