Sintra: A Gentle Guide to Portugal's Hill of Palaces

There is a moment on the train from Lisbon, somewhere past the last suburb, when the windows begin to cloud. The air coming in smells of eucalyptus and wet stone. Ahead, a green hill rises out of flat farmland, and on top of it sits a palace painted in red and mustard yellow, half-hidden in cloud. That is Sintra, and it has been doing this to travellers for centuries.

Sintra is usually sold as a day trip: off the train at ten, three palaces, a pastry, back to Lisbon by six. We would gently suggest the opposite. Sintra is really Portugal's oldest hill station — a cool, damp, shaded place that the court moved to when Lisbon became unbearable. Treated as a hill station, with two nights and a slow rhythm, it is one of the most rewarding stops in Europe for travellers over 60.

Treated as a sprint, it is cobbles, queues and tired knees. This guide is about the first version.

A little history

The hills above Sintra have been settled since prehistoric times, but the town's shape comes from two very different centuries.

Under Moorish rule the place was known as Xintara, and a fortress was raised along the ridge in the 8th and 9th centuries to watch the coast and the approach to Lisbon. It fell to Christian forces in 1109, and Sintra received its royal charter in 1154. From then on the Portuguese kings came up here in summer, and the palace in the valley grew room by room.

The second transformation came in the 1800s. In 1838 Ferdinand II — German-born, married to Queen Maria II, and a passionate amateur of gardens and architecture — bought a ruined hilltop monastery above the town. What began as a plan to restore it became, with the help of the engineer Wilhelm Ludwig von Eschwege, something far stranger: a palace stitched together from Gothic, Moorish, Renaissance and invented elements, finished in 1854. It is now considered one of the great monuments of European Romanticism, and it set a fashion. Wealthy families followed, planting exotic parks across the hillside.

In 1995 the whole hillside — palaces, estates, gardens and woods together — was inscribed by UNESCO as the Cultural Landscape of Sintra. That phrase matters: the listing is not for one building, but for the way the whole green slope was gardened into a dream.

Palácio Nacional da Pena seen from the Castelo dos Mouros, the medieval fortress on the neighbouring ridge.

What to see

Sintra's sights are scattered up and down a steep hillside. Nobody sees all of them comfortably, and nobody should try. Choose two per day.

Palácio Nacional da Pena

The famous one, and it deserves it. Red and yellow towers, blue-and-white tiled walls, a stone triton over a gateway, terraces that look out over the Atlantic when the mist allows. The interiors are kept much as the royal family left them in 1910, which makes them unexpectedly intimate — a bathroom, a breakfast table, a cluttered study.

It also sits on the highest, hardest ground in Sintra. Read our advice section before you plan this one, and buy a timed entry ticket online well before you travel.

Castelo dos Mouros

The Moorish castle on the next ridge is the opposite experience: no rooms, no furniture, just some 450 metres of ancient rampart running over giant boulders, with views to Lisbon one way and the ocean the other. It is magnificent — and it is almost entirely steps and uneven stone, including a long stair to the highest tower. Honest verdict: if stairs or uncertain footing are a problem, admire it from Pena's terraces instead.

Palácio Nacional de Sintra

The oldest surviving royal palace in Portugal, and the gentlest of the great sights, because it stands right in the middle of town. Its two white conical chimneys, about 33 metres tall, rise over the kitchens and are visible from half the hillside. Inside are the Swan Room, its ceiling painted with 27 collared swans — a nod to Philippa of Lancaster, who married King João I — the Magpie Room, and a small Arab Room lined with geometric tiles around a fountain. Much of the route is on one level, though there are stairs between floors.

Quinta da Regaleira

A short walk uphill from the centre, this estate was created between about 1904 and 1910 by the collector António Augusto Carvalho Monteiro with the Italian architect and stage designer Luigi Manini. It is a garden of symbols: chapels, grottoes, towers and the celebrated Initiation Well, a spiral stair of nine landings dropping into the hillside, which never held water. You can look down into it from the top without descending; the stair and the tunnels below are damp, dim and uneven.

Parque e Palácio de Monserrate

Our quiet favourite, and the one most visitors skip. A pink-and-cream pavilion of arches and plasterwork, set in a botanical park of tree ferns, Mexican agaves and Himalayan rhododendrons. It is far less crowded, the palace's ground floor is largely level, and a paved path of roughly 350 metres leads up from the gate to the house. The lower garden is prettier but steeper and gravelly — go as far as feels good and turn back.

The terraces and painted walls of Palácio Nacional da Pena in Sintra.

A day trip nearby

From Sintra the land runs west and simply stops. Cabo da Roca is the westernmost point of mainland Europe: a lighthouse, a stone marker, low windswept scrub and a 100-metre drop to the sea. It takes roughly 40 minutes by local bus or about 20–30 minutes by taxi from Sintra, and the essential view is a few flat steps from the car park — one of the best returns on effort anywhere on this coast. Hold onto hats and scarves; the wind here is serious even on calm days.

Many travellers continue down the coast to Cascais, a former fishing town turned seaside resort with a sheltered bay, a long flat promenade and good fish restaurants. Buses link Sintra, Cabo da Roca and Cascais, and Cascais has its own direct train line back to Lisbon. Route numbers on this coast have changed more than once in recent years, so confirm them at the station on the day rather than trusting an old guidebook.

Honest advice for comfortable travel

• Sleep in Sintra, not Lisbon. This is the single best decision you can make. Staying two nights in the historic centre or near the station lets you reach the hilltops before the day-trip coaches arrive, and means you can go back to your room in the afternoon instead of pushing on.
• Expect hills everywhere. Sintra's historic centre is charming and relentlessly sloped, with cobbles that become slippery in mist and rain. Shoes with real grip matter more here than in almost any town we write about. A walking pole earns its place.
• Don't walk up to Pena. The road from the town to the palace climbs around 4 km and takes most people well over an hour. Take the circular bus 434 from the station, or a taxi or tuk-tuk. A 24-hour bus pass is good value if you plan to use it twice.
• Inside Pena park, take the shuttle. The bus leaves you at the park gate, not the palace. From there it is a further climb of 10–15 minutes uphill. A small shuttle covers that stretch for a modest extra fee, and we would use it in both directions without apology. Even then, the final approach to the door is a ramp of roughly 90 metres with sections as steep as about 18 per cent, so pace yourself and use the handrails.
• Ask for help in advance. Parques de Sintra, which runs Pena, Monserrate and the Moorish castle, can arrange wheelchair loan and assistance if you contact them before your visit. Accessible routes shift with restoration work, so ask about current conditions.
• Monserrate instead of the Moorish castle. If you have one hill in you rather than two, spend it here. More to see, far less climbing, more benches, more shade.
• Bring a layer, even in August. The hills make their own weather: fog, high humidity and temperatures noticeably cooler than Lisbon. That is the great gift of Sintra in summer, but it surprises people in short sleeves.
• Avoid the middle of the day. Between about 10.30 and 15.00 the town and the palaces are at their fullest. Mornings and late afternoons are calmer, cooler and much kinder.
• Book timed tickets online. Pena in particular sells entry slots, and arriving without one can mean a long wait standing on a slope.

Pena Palace viewed from the Castelo dos Mouros: both monuments sit high above the town of Sintra.

What to eat

Sintra is a pastry town before it is anything else, and the two local sweets are genuinely local — not sold everywhere in Portugal.

Queijadas de Sintra are small, firm tarts of fresh cheese, sugar, egg and cinnamon in a paper-thin crust, a recipe documented in the Sintra hills since at least the mid-18th century, when they were made for travellers coming up from Lisbon. Travesseiros — "pillows" — are long rectangles of flaky puff pastry filled with warm almond-and-egg cream, invented at Casa Piriquita in the 1940s by a granddaughter of the founders. That shop has been baking on Rua das Padarias since 1862, and the recipe has reportedly never been written down for outsiders. Order one of each with a coffee, sitting down. They are rich.

For a proper meal, Sintra eats like the Lisbon coast: grilled Atlantic fish, salt cod in a dozen forms, clams with coriander and garlic, slow-cooked pork, and soups thick enough to be a meal. Portions are generous and lunch is usually the better value. The Colares wine region lies just below the hills towards the sea, where old vines grow in sandy soil close to the Atlantic — worth asking for by name when you see it on a list, as it is produced in small quantities.

One practical note: restaurants in the historic centre fill up at lunchtime with day visitors. Eat early, eat late, or walk five minutes away from the palace gates.

Getting there

Our verdict

Sintra has a reputation for being overrun, and on an August afternoon at the Pena gate that reputation is earned. But the crowds in Sintra are a scheduling problem, not a place problem — and schedules are something travellers with time can solve.

Sleep on the hill. Be at a palace gate when it opens. Spend your afternoons in Monserrate's tree ferns or at a café table on Rua das Padarias with a travesseiro, and let the mist come down over the chimneys around five o'clock. Take the bus up and the shuttle to the door and feel no guilt whatsoever about either.

It is not an easy town underfoot, and we would not pretend otherwise: the cobbles are steep, the castle is steps, and the hills do not flatten out for anyone. But almost every great sight here has a kinder route to it, and the rewards — royal rooms left as they were, a garden of palms in cool Atlantic air, a painted palace floating in cloud — are out of all proportion to the effort.

The ochre and red walls of Palácio Nacional da Pena, above Sintra.

“In Sintra the clouds arrive before the visitors and stay long after they have gone.”

Photo credits

• Sintra Portugal Palácio da Pena-01: CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• Palácio Nacional da Pena, Sintra, Portugal, 20250606 1155 0102: Jakub Hałun, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• Palacio Nacional da Pena, Sintra, Portugal, 2019-05-25, DD 153-155 HDR: Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• Palácio Nacional da Pena, Sintra, Portugal, 20250606 1213 0172: Jakub Hałun, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
• Palacio Nacional da Pena, Sintra, Portugal, 2019-05-25, DD 134-136 HDR: Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons