NOT YOUR ALGARVE: Building Beauty From the Ground Up

Welcome, Anna. Your digital space, @not.your.algarve, captures a breathtaking, sun-drenched aesthetic of slow living in Portugal. But your journey goes far beyond a dreamy feed. Let's talk about the core of your story: «NOT YOUR ALGARVE: Building Beauty From the Ground Up».

Thank you. For me, those words aren't just a title or a catchy phrase for a magazine cover. They are the exact summary of my reality. People see the final picture—the sunshine, the flowers, the coastal aesthetic—and they think it's just a pretty postcard life. But they don't see what it took to get here.

Your path to Portugal wasn't a standard relocation or a planned lifestyle change, was it?

Not at all. My life split sharply into "before" and "after." When war forced me to leave my home in Ukraine, I lost everything familiar overnight. Moving to the Algarve with my daughter wasn't a romantic escape; it was a leap into total darkness. I had to learn how to breathe again in a foreign country, carrying the invisible weight of trauma while trying to build a safe world for my child from absolute zero.

And yet, you took on one of the most demanding projects imaginable—rebuilding a traditional Algarve ruin completely on your own.

Exactly. When your entire life turns to ash, you crave something tangible to hold onto. Rebuilding that ruin became my metaphor for survival. There were days when I was covered in dust, carrying heavy materials, managing local contractors by myself, and feeling completely alone. There was no "strong male shoulder" or traditional support system to lean on—I had to become that strength for myself and my daughter.

That juxtaposition—being a woman associated with softness, surrounded by flowers on the cover, yet carrying this immense, structural resilience—is striking. How do those two sides coexist in you?

People often look at a woman in flowers and think of fragility. But true strength isn't about being made of stone; it's about the ability to bloom despite the ruins around you. Building beauty from the ground up is an act of defiance. When the world tries to break you, creating an aesthetic, warm, and loving environment is my way of fighting back and claiming my future.

What is the hardest truth about your journey that social media doesn't show?

The absolute isolation of being the sole provider, protector, and decision-maker. There is no one to say, "I've got you, you can rest now." Every bureaucratic hurdle in a foreign language, every financial risk, every heavy brick—it's all on me. But at the end of the day, looking at what I've built with my own hands reminds me: you don't need a fairy tale to save you. You can be the architect of your own empire.

Model: Anna Deverishcheva @not.your.algarve

Photographer: Amir Rakhmatulaev @amir.photography.pt