Sintra Day Trip from Lisbon: Six Hours, Three Palaces, One Perfect Route

Sintra is the closest you can get to Disneyland in European high culture, and it is absolutely worth doing. The palaces are extraordinary, the national park is beautiful, and the tourist bus is a trap. That last part is the point of this article.

How do you get from Lisbon to Sintra?

The train from Rossio station to Sintra runs every twenty minutes, takes forty minutes exactly, and costs €2.35 each way. From Sintra station you have three options for getting up the hill to Pena Palace: the 434 tourist bus (€6.90 round-trip, will make you want to walk into the sea), a tuk-tuk (€15 to €30), or a taxi (€10 flat rate).

We did the taxi up and the walk down. This is the correct order. The taxi takes 8 minutes. The tourist bus takes 45 minutes and drops you at the worst entrance. If you save €6 on the bus, you'll lose 90 minutes of your life.

What should I see first in Sintra?

Pena Palace at 9:30am is the lurid yellow-and-red fantasy palace that sits on top of a hill like a wedding cake made by someone on mescaline. Built in the 1840s by King Ferdinand II as a summer residence, it is exactly as chaotic as it looks. Book the 9:30 entry slot online at parquesdesintra.pt (€14). Walk the Park of Pena for an hour before you go inside: the park has camellia gardens, fern valleys, and a chapel that pre-dates the palace by 300 years. Inside Pena itself, allow forty-five minutes. The rooms are small and the queues inside get brutal by 11am.

Is the Moorish Castle worth visiting?

From Pena, walk ten minutes through the woods to the Moorish Castle, a ruined set of eighth-century walls snaking along the hilltop. Entry is €6 for the castle alone or €27 combined with Pena. The castle isn't a building, it's a route: you walk the ramparts for about forty minutes and the view is better than Pena because you can see Pena from it. This is where you get the photograph.

Where should I eat lunch near Sintra?

Walk down from the Moorish Castle to Sintra town (thirty minutes, downhill, beautiful). Have a queijada (local cheese pastry) at Piriquita on Rua das Padarias, then catch a taxi to Nortada up in Azenhas do Mar for grilled fish on the Atlantic cliff. Linda has never forgiven me for ordering the grilled sole because it was the single best piece of fish she'd eaten that year and she only had two bites.

Skip the restaurants in Sintra town centre. They charge €30 a head for uninspired cod. The villages around Sintra are where the real food lives.

Is Cascais worth adding to a Sintra day trip?

After lunch, take the train from Sintra to Cascais (twenty minutes, or an hour by bus via the scenic Praia do Guincho route). Cascais is a pretty seaside town with a marina, a small old town, and two Russian superyachts. We had an hour and a half: a coffee on the marina, a walk to the fort, then the Linha de Cascais train back to Lisbon in time for ice cream at Gelateria Nannarella (R. Nova da Piedade 64). The gelato queue goes around the block. It moves. It's worth it. Linda had nocciola and fior di latte. I had pistacchio and stracciatella.

One hour in Cascais is enough if you've already done Sintra. Any longer and you're diminishing the day.

We walked back to the Airbnb in Lapa and lay on the sofa for an hour before heading out to dinner at Loco, a 1-Michelin-star tasting menu restaurant we'd booked for the end of the day. But that's a different article.

How much does a Sintra day trip cost for two people?