Sintra: what to see, where to stay and how to get around
Sintra exists because of a microclimate. The granite ridge catches the Atlantic cloud and holds it, so the hills are ten degrees cooler and far wetter than the plain around them — which in a country this hot is the whole explanation for a thousand years of palaces. Moors, kings, English exiles and Portuguese industrialists all built here for the same reason: the air. An hour and a half in the village itself, and all of it is uphill.
A short history of Sintra
The Moors built a castle on the Sintra hills in the 8th and 9th centuries, and in 1147 it was taken by Afonso Henriques, the first king of Portugal. The kings of Portugal chose Sintra as a summer residence for its cool mountain air. In 1809 Lord Byron visited and wrote about it in his poems. In 1842 King Ferdinand II began building the colourful Pena Palace on the summit of the hill. In 1995 the Cultural Landscape of Sintra, with its palaces, estates and forests, was declared a World Heritage Site.
The ten best sights in Sintra
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1Sintra Vila
The old village, and it is two streets — go before ten or after five
2Sintra National Palace13 euro, 10 reduced. The two cones are kitchen chimneys. Verified 10/2026
3Pena Palace20 euro palace and park, 10 for the park alone. Book a time slot. Verified 10/2026
4Quinta da Regaleira20 euro. The initiation well goes nine turns down. Tripadvisor’s number one here. Verified 10/2026
5Castelo dos MourosA ruined Moorish wall along the ridge, and the best view in Sintra is from it
6Monserrate Palace12 euro, 10 reduced. A fraction of the crowd, and the best garden. Verified 10/2026
7Convento dos CapuchosCells cut into the rock and lined with cork; eight monks lived here
8Palácio de SeteaisA 1787 neoclassical palace, now a hotel, and the terrace is open to the public
9Chalet da Condessa d’EdlaA Swiss chalet in the Pena park, built by the king for his second wife, an opera singer
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10Cruz Alta
The highest point of the Sintra hills at 528 metres, and it is free to walk to
Scan with your phone camera to open the map there
What is an audio walk?
Tours in Sintra →A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Sintra:
Free walking tours in Sintra
The village, and why it is here
Sintra exists because of a microclimate. The granite ridge catches the Atlantic cloud and holds it, so the hills are ten degrees cooler and far wetter than the plain around them — which in a country this hot is the whole explanation for a thousand years of palaces. Moors, kings, English exiles and Portuguese industrialists all built here for the same reason: the air. An hour and a half in the village itself, and all of it is uphill.
- Volta do Duche · The ten-minute walk from the station to the village runs beside a long stone wall and under an aqueduct, and the aqueduct is the point: it was built in the sixteenth century to carry spring water from the hills to the National Palace, because a palace in Sintra needed water and the ridge provided it. Walk it rather than taking the bus — the bus goes the other way.
- Sintra National Palace · The two enormous white cones are not towers and not decoration: they are kitchen chimneys, thirty-three metres high, above a kitchen that could roast an entire ox. This is the oldest surviving royal palace in Portugal, lived in from the fourteenth century to the nineteenth, and it is the only one that was never rebuilt in one style — so Moorish, Gothic and Manueline rooms open into each other. Thirteen euro, verified 10/2026.
- Rua das Padarias · The bakers’ street, and the pastry to eat here was invented on it: the travesseiro, a flaky pillow of puff pastry filled with almond and egg cream, made at Piriquita since the shop opened in 1862. The other local one is the queijada, a small cheese tart that Sintra has been selling since at least the twelfth century — it appears in medieval tax records as payment in kind.
- Lawrence’s Hotel · Trading since 1764 and it claims to be the oldest hotel on the Iberian peninsula. Byron stayed here in 1809 and then wrote about Sintra in Childe Harold as a glorious Eden — and that poem is the reason English travellers started coming, which is the reason half the palaces on this hill were built by foreigners. One stanza created the tourist industry of a village.
- Igreja de Santa Maria · The oldest church in Sintra, thirteenth century, and it is almost always locked — which is itself the interesting part: this was the parish church of the town until the 1755 earthquake damaged it, and the congregation moved to São Martinho and never came back. It stands on the edge of the village with nothing around it.
- Parque da Liberdade · A free public park on the slope below the village with a stream running through it, and it is empty while the queues at Pena are an hour long — which is the single most useful thing to know about Sintra: about three million people visit this village a year, and almost all of them go to the same three places at the same three hours.
Up the ridge
Two things sit on the ridge above the village and they are six hundred years apart: a Moorish wall from the eighth or ninth century, abandoned after the Christian conquest and left as a ruin, and a palace from 1842 painted red and yellow by a German prince who had read too much about castles. Walking up takes about forty minutes and is steep; bus 434 is seven euro sixty return. Verified 10/2026.
- Castelo dos Mouros · Built by the Moors in the eighth or ninth century, surrendered to Afonso Henriques in 1147 without a fight, and then simply abandoned — the Christians had no use for a hilltop fort when the threat had moved south. It stayed a ruin for seven hundred years until Ferdinand restored the walls in the 1840s as a romantic landscape feature for his palace next door. The view from the wall is the best in Sintra.
- Pena Palace · Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg, the German husband of Queen Maria the Second, bought a ruined monastery on the summit in 1838 and spent thirty years turning it into this — Moorish arches, Manueline windows, Gothic vaults and a Triton over the main gate, all in one building and all deliberately mixed. It predates Neuschwanstein by thirty years and influenced it. Twenty euro, booked slots, verified 10/2026.
- The Pena park · Two hundred hectares, and every tree in it was planted — Ferdinand imported species from Australia, New Zealand, China and North America and laid out a park with no straight lines anywhere, so that it would look wild. The result is a man-made forest that is now a serious botanical collection. The park alone is ten euro, and on a crowded day it is the better ticket.
- Chalet da Condessa d’Edla · After Maria died, Ferdinand married Elise Hensler, an opera singer from Switzerland, which caused a scandal — a king’s widower marrying a performer — and he built her a Swiss chalet in the park, decorated with cork bark on the outside. It burned down in 1999 and was restored over eight years from photographs. It is in the park ticket and almost nobody walks that far.
- Cruz Alta · Five hundred and twenty-eight metres, the highest point of the Sintra hills, with a sixteenth-century stone cross on top and a view that takes in Lisbon, the Tagus estuary and the Atlantic at once. It is a twenty-minute walk from the Pena gate along a road, it is free, and it is usually empty — the three million visitors do not come here.
- Convento dos Capuchos · Founded in 1560 and built for eight friars, and the cells are cut into the living rock and lined with cork — cork on the walls, cork on the doors, cork on the ceilings, as insulation against the damp. The doorways are deliberately low so that entering requires bowing. It is four kilometres west of Pena and you need a car or the 435 does not go there.
Regaleira, and the money that came after
The palaces on the ridge were royal. The ones below it were not: from the 1840s onwards rich outsiders bought land in Sintra and built fantasies on it — an Italian architect for a Brazilian coffee millionaire, an English baronet with a botanical obsession, a German merchant. Those three estates sit within a kilometre of each other on the Monserrate road, and they are the better half of Sintra. Two hours, downhill, or bus 435 at five fifty.
- Quinta da Regaleira · Built between 1904 and 1910 for António Carvalho Monteiro, who made his money in Brazilian coffee and gemstones, by the Italian opera-set designer Luigi Manini — and the whole garden is a deliberate initiation route with Masonic, Templar and alchemical symbols. The Initiation Well is a twenty-seven-metre inverted tower with nine spiral landings, one for each circle of Dante’s hell. Twenty euro, verified 10/2026.
- Quinta do Relógio · A neo-Moorish house of about 1850, right beside Regaleira, built for a Portuguese noble and covered in horseshoe arches and tilework — and it matters because it was first: the neo-Moorish fashion that produced half of Sintra started with buildings like this one, and Regaleira is a later and richer answer to it. It is private and you see it from the road.
- Palácio Biester · Built in the 1880s for a German merchant family by the same architect who later did Regaleira, and it opened to the public only in 2022 after a hundred and forty years as a private house — which is why you have probably never heard of it. The film The Ninth Gate was shot in it. It is the least crowded of the three estates by a wide margin.
- Palácio de Seteais · Built in 1787 for a Dutch consul and completed with a triumphal arch in 1802 to mark a royal visit. The name means seven sighs, and the local story is that the convention that ended the French occupation was signed here and the sighs were Portuguese — which is false: it was signed in Lisbon. It is a hotel now and the terrace is open to anyone who walks up to it.
- Monserrate Palace · Francis Cook, an English textile millionaire, bought the estate in 1863 and built this — a palace with an Indian dome, Moorish plasterwork and a Gothic gallery, which sounds like a mess and is in fact the most coherent building in Sintra. The park holds about three thousand species in geographic zones: a Mexican garden, an Australian one, a fern valley. Twelve euro, verified 10/2026.
- Colares · A wine village between the hills and the sea, and its vines are a genuine botanical curiosity: they are planted in deep sand above clay, and because phylloxera cannot move through sand, these are among the very few vines in Europe still growing on their own ungrafted roots. The grape is Ramisco, the vines are trained along the ground against the Atlantic wind, and the area under vine has shrunk to almost nothing.
Getting to Sintra and getting around
- Sintra station · 40 minutes from Rossio in Lisbon; 2.55 euro single, 5.10 return. Verified 10/2026
- Bus 434 · 7.60 euro return, 4.10 one way, from outside the station to the castle and Pena. Verified 10/2026
- Bus 435 · 5.50 euro, hop-on hop-off to Regaleira, Seteais and Monserrate. Verified 10/2026
Cheap eats in Sintra
Sintra has two pastries of its own and both are older than they look. The queijada is a small cheese tart that appears in medieval tax records — villagers paid their dues in queijadas — and the travesseiro is a puff-pastry pillow filled with almond and egg cream, invented at one shop in the village. Everything else here is priced for three million visitors a year, so the honest advice is to eat standing at a counter and have lunch in São Pedro. Two to twelve euro.
- Piriquita · About 1.50 euro each; eat it warm
- Queijadas de Sintra · Sold in sixes; a few euro a pack
- São Pedro de Penaferrim · A third below village prices; the fair is 2nd and 4th Sunday
- Colares wine · The cooperative in the village sells it
- Azenhas do Mar · Expensive, and worth it; book ahead
- Praia da Adraga restaurant · One restaurant, one beach; always full
- Fonte Mourisca · Free spring water; fill your bottle
- Ericeira · The real fish prices; 18 kilometres north
Museums in Sintra
There are seven paid monuments in Sintra and visiting them all is a mistake — the queues in July are an hour each and the village is two streets wide. The order that works: Regaleira first thing in the morning, the Moorish Castle for the view, Pena in a booked slot in the afternoon, and Monserrate on the second day if there is one. Prices are 20, 20, 13 and 12 euro and none of them is included in the others. Verified 10/2026.
- Quinta da Regaleira · 20 euro, and Tripadvisor’s number one here. Verified 10/2026
- Pena Palace · 20 euro palace and park, 10 park only. Booked slots. Verified 10/2026
- Sintra National Palace · 13 euro, 10 reduced. Verified 10/2026
- Monserrate Palace · 12 euro, 10 reduced, and a fraction of the crowd. Verified 10/2026
- Castelo dos Mouros · The cheapest of the four, and the best view
- Palácio Biester · Opened 2022; no queue at all
- Toy Museum · Hours are unreliable; check first
- Odrinhas museum · Ten kilometres out; nearly always empty
Nature and day trips near Sintra
The Sintra hills are a granite massif that rises straight out of the plain to five hundred and twenty-eight metres and sits nine kilometres from the Atlantic, and that geometry makes the weather: cloud forms on the ridge and stays. The whole area is a protected natural park, the coast is a reserve, and the result is that within ten kilometres of the village there is a cloud forest, a cape that is the western end of Europe, and four Atlantic beaches with almost nothing built on them.
- Cabo da Roca · Bus 403 from Sintra or Cascais; always windy
- Peninha · No ticket, no bus; a car or a long walk
- Praia da Adraga · One restaurant, one car park, nothing else
- Praia Grande · Dinosaur prints in the north cliff; a path up
- Azenhas do Mar · The sea pool is free in summer
- Praia do Magoito · A protected fossil dune behind it
- Alto da Vigia · Free and open; a Roman temple and a Moorish tower
- Guincho · Wind every day; the dunes are protected
Things to do in Sintra with kids
- Quinta da Regaleira · Tunnels, caves and a well you walk down — the best one here for children
- Pena park · 10 euro for the park alone, and it is all paths, bridges and ponds
- Castelo dos Mouros · A wall you can walk along the whole length of, with towers
- Toy Museum · 20,000 toys; the hours are unreliable so check first
- Praia das Maçãs tram · A 1904 tram from Sintra to the beach, running in summer only
- Azenhas do Mar pool · A sea pool filled by the tide, free, and safe when the sea is calm
- Cabo da Roca · The certificate with their name on it is the souvenir that works
- Parque da Liberdade · Free, shaded, with a playground, five minutes from the palace
Holy places in Sintra
Sintra has been a sacred hill for a very long time and by more than one religion: a Roman temple to the sun and the moon on the coast, a Muslim cemetery inside the Moorish walls, a Hieronymite monastery on the summit that became a palace, and a Capuchin convent cut into the rock. The hill was holy before any of them, which is what the Roman name — the mountain of the moon — is recording.
- Convento dos Capuchos · Four kilometres west of Pena; a car
- Pena’s cloister · Inside the palace ticket; easy to miss
- Alto da Vigia Roman temple · Free and open; on the cliff above the beach
- Moorish cemetery · Inside the castle ticket; marked, not displayed
- Igreja de Santa Maria · Usually locked; walk round the outside
- Peninha sanctuary · On the crag; no bus, and often in cloud
Nightlife in Sintra
Sintra has no night. The village empties by eight when the last trains fill up, the restaurants close early, and everything that happens after dark happens elsewhere — in Cascais twelve kilometres south, in Estoril at the casino, or back in Lisbon forty minutes away by train. That is worth knowing before you book a room here: the quiet is real, and so is the absence.
- São Pedro at night · Open till about midnight; local prices
- Estoril casino · 25 minutes by train, change at Cascais
- Cascais · The 403 bus, 40 minutes
- Praia das Maçãs · The tram runs April to October only
- The last train · Every 20 minutes; 5.10 euro return. Verified 10/2026
- Ericeira · A car; the bus is slow
Frequently asked questions about Sintra
What is there to see in Sintra?
The top sights in Sintra are Sintra Vila, Sintra National Palace and Pena Palace. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.
How many days do you need in Sintra?
Three to four days are enough to see the best of Sintra without rushing, including at least one walking tour.
Is there a free walking tour in Sintra?
Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Sintra, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: The village, and why it is here.
How do you get to Sintra and get around?
The main ways are Sintra station, Bus 434 and Bus 435. Full details are in the transport section on this page.
Where to stay in Sintra, and for how much?
sleepntrip shows only rooms in Sintra that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.
Looking for a hotel in Sintra for your dates?
Only rooms that meet nine conditions, up to $80 a night.