Parasailing was engineered for soldiers before it was ever sold to holidaymakers. In 1961 the French engineer Pierre-Marcel Lemoigne patented an ascending parachute, towed behind a vehicle so paratroopers could rehearse canopy control on a short tether. The maritime version came thirteen years later, when the American Mark McCulloh assembled the first winch boat: a hull fitted with a hydraulic drum and a raised flight deck, allowing a passenger to leave dry and return dry. The albufeira parasailing boat trip tours that now work out of Marina de Albufeira are direct descendants of that drum. The harness, the spreader bar, the measured pay-out of line — known locally as paraquedismo ascensional — is 1970s thinking, barely altered. Albufeira itself is older than its skyline suggests. The name derives from the Arabic al-Buhera, meaning lagoon, a reference to the sheltered water that once lay behind the headland. Roman salting tanks, a Moorish castle and a Portuguese fishing fleet occupied the same cove in sequence. Until charter aircraft began landing at Faro in 1965, the town counted a few thousand residents and a beach full of working boats. Praia dos Pescadores, reached through a tunnel cut beneath the cliff, was a slipway rather than a sunbed terrace. The marina arrived far later, opening in 2003 roughly three kilometres west of the old centre, with some 475 berths behind a pastel wall of apartment blocks. What sells this coastline from above is its vertical grammar. The cliffs are Miocene limestone and calcareous sandstone, soft enough for the Atlantic to hollow into arches, blowholes and collapsed domes. Benagil, the most photographed sea cave in Portugal, sits some twenty kilometres west. Ponta da Baleeira closes the bay to the east. At Olhos de Água, freshwater springs surface through the sand at low tide. Tow lines on commercial rigs typically run between 50 and 150 metres, enough altitude to read the shore as cartography: ochre headlands, green shelf water, the white seam of surf. Bottlenose and common dolphins work that same shelf, which is why parasailing flights and Benagil cave cruises share the marina's pontoons. The equipment explains the activity's reach. A parasail wing is a vented nylon canopy on a rigid bar, flown at a fixed angle by the boat rather than steered by the passenger, which removes any need for training, licensing or strength. Tandem and triple seats make it a family manoeuvre; the solo flight remains the purist's option. Timetabled like any other Algarve Coast watersport, an albufeira parasailing boat trip tour is less a sport than a vantage point — the cliff line seen whole, in the minutes before the winch begins to draw the flier home.