DETAILS Hospitality Sports & Leisure knew they had a man who could both accept and overcome a challenge when they appointed Nuno Sepúlveda as Co-CEO to restore their Dom Pedro Golf portfolio of five courses and six hotels to its former standing among the best golf destinations in Europe.

He had just spent six years as general manager at Costa Navarino in Greece, arriving when it was virtually unknown in the golf travel market and leaving with it just having laid claim to two prestigious golf accolades.

In 2022, Costa Navarino was named the World’s Best Emerging Golf Destination and the resort’s International Olympic Academy course at Navarino Hills was acknowledged as the World’s Best New Golf Course.

But the clock needs to be turned back almost 30 years to reveal the true levels of his strength of character, resolve and abilities, to 1997 when he left his native Portugal to study at a university in England – without being able to speak English.

“I went to UK to study and I couldn’t speak English. I enrolled in the wrong course because I didn’t do the enrolment correctly,” laughs the 47-year-old, “so I went to university to do landscape architecture and I ended doing turf science.

“When I asked someone to help me out with the translation so I could change the course, the head of department for turf science convinced me to do turf science – and I’d never been on a golf course in my life.

“So my whole life in golf, it’s just a whole mistake, a very pleasant mistake. This was the beginning of my life in golf.”

He might not have been on a golf course, but he had spent a lot of time on a rugby pitch.

“The reason I went to the UK is because I wanted to play rugby and Myerscough College in Preston had a very good rugby team. We had an exchange programme with my college back in Portugal, I went to the UK for 15 days, and I wanted to go back there to study.

“I did my internship, did my Masters degree at Cranfield University, then it’s always been golf, always sport, always hospitality. It’s just by a pure mistake.”

A year into his new job and Sepúlveda and the DETAILS team are already a long way down the road to identifying and rectifying the mistakes that led to a decline in Vilamoura’s stature as one of Europe’s first destinations for golfers ‘chasing the sun’.

“We’re talking about 200,000 golf rounds per year at Vilamoura and with that amount of usage, with very little investment, it just got tired,” he reasons.

“The cart paths were broken, the clubhouses are very old, the kitchens don’t fit in with today, the driving range technology was non-existent.

“What we are doing is deferred investment. It should have happened in the past, a little bit every year. Now we are doing everything that didn’t happen in 15 years – and we have to do it in a few years.”

Complacency also took hold, he believes, possibly because Portugal could virtually guarantee its visitors from northern Europe their main requirement – playing golf in warm, dry weather.

“It was always that easy. People were just coming regardless of what we were doing with the golf courses or in the hotels. People got this feeling that we can keep rising prices because people love to come here and we don’t need to put on a product.

“We’ve now got to a point that, because there are so many other options out there, in flights and accessibility, we realise it’s the end of the line for that concept, it’s time to improve the product.”

Hotel improvements will involve renovation of Dom Pedro Marina and the Dom Pedro Vilamoura and will extend to development of new hotels, in Palmares, on the Old Course and on the Millennium course. The Victoria golf course, home to the Portugal Masters from 2007 to 2022, is already under refurbishment.

The rehabilitation will extend beyond golf with the services provided by Vilamoura’s equestrian centre being upgraded and there are plans to create a “much-needed” sports centre.

“For many years things were over promised and not delivered,” says Sepúlveda. “Now we are underpromising and hopefully overdelivering. That’s going to be our concept here. People are willing to pay more if you deliver the product and if there’s value in it.

“We want to cater for everybody, and have different products, different hotels, different golf courses for different segments.”

Sepúlveda is also president of the National Council of the Golf Industry, a non-profit association founded in Portugal in 1995 that gives the industry a voice in liaisons with government and local authorities.

“It’s been a great challenge and our team at CNIG represents different areas of Portugal, different golf courses, including the island, so I think we have a very representative image of golf in Portugal and we’ve been very well received by the government, by the local authorities, to let us help build a future for golf.

“We need to set the record straight that it’s not an elite sport and, actually, for the economy the golf industry in Portugal currently represents €4.5bn a year. It’s much more than sport; it’s an economy, it’s an industry and we want to be seen as that.”

Given all his commitments to both job and family – wife Rosario, daughters aged 21 and 18 plus a son of 14 – it is small wonder he has little time to play golf. This was not a problem until this year when visits to two of the sports iconic venues, Augusta and the Old Course, St Andrews, reignited his desire to play.

“This year I went to Augusta National on the Sunday for The Masters and I fell in love with golf again, and then I went to play the Old Course in St Andrews as well,” he enthuses. “I’m playing golf every week now. For the first time in 15 years I’m crazy about golf again.

“I’d seen the Masters on television for 20 years, but it was 100 times better than I expected. I would encourage anyone who has the chance to go there to go because it’s mind blowing.

“I thought I knew everything about Augusta National, I’d been there before for business. But to see the event, to see the grass, to see no mobile phones allowed on the site,” he enthused.

“First time I was without a mobile phone for 12 hours straight. I remember everything. I can speak vividly about my experience there better than any pictures.

“I loved the Old Course. I study a lot of Old Tom Morris because of the greenkeeping and the design as well and so it’s a place to go for a guy with my background. It was one of the best experiences I’ve had in my life – and yet I was treated so bad by the golf course!”

One passion that has never waned concerns education, a process that Sepúlveda has continued throughout his career and this year he earned a certificate in leading with finance, online at the Harvard Business School.

“I was not busy enough, so I tried to keep myself entertained with something else as well,” he smiles. “I’ve always studied for my career… consultancy management, project management, lots of languages and a lot of ways of doing business, and I was not familiar with some ways of business.

“So I thought I needed to learn a bit better for some of the conversations I was having here in Vilamoura, so that’s why I went back to school again.”