If you’re visiting Lisbon, Sintra is probably the most popular day trip destination and for good reason! Sintra-Cascais Nature Park sits in the Sintra Mountains and is a UNESCO World Heritage site because of it’s architecture, palaces, castles, villas, gardens and the historic old town.

We were staying in an Airbnb between Barrio Alto and Alfama in the historic district of Lisbon. You can get to Sintra by train but we decided to call an Uber and the drive was about 50 minutes. He dropped us off right at the top of the hill and the entrance to the National Palace of Pena grounds.

From there you can buy tickets to all of the different attractions. You won’t have enough time to do them all in one day so I recommend narrowing it down to 2, especially if you are walking everywhere like we did.

There were tons of tour buses dropping people off so if you’re someone who prefers a guided tour or that cannot walk up and down hills, there are options. We just prefer to explore on foot and at our own pace.

We purchased tickets for the park, National Palace of Pena and Castelo dos Mouros. It was super busy (even on a Monday) so we had a 3-hour wait to get into the palace. It worked out great through because that’s about how long it took us to walk around the palace grounds and for me to live out all of Witcher role-plays. (IYKYK)

We really enjoyed walking (which was really more like hiking) around the beautiful and well-maintained park and tried to hit all of points of interest. We even found ourselves rushing to get back to our scheduled tour because it was that vast.

When it was finally our turn at the Palace we were met with soooo many long lines. It was beyond crowded. You couldn’t freely walk through, it was just a slow progression of one person after the other as we shuffled in a single-file line. 

Although it was interesting to see how well preserved the interior was, in retrospect I probably wouldn’t have purchased tickets to go inside. With your park ticket you can walk around the exterior and get an up close view which would’ve been good enough for me.

From there we walked down the hill to the Castelo Dos Mouros. Which I thought was even cooler than the palace. Its a medieval castle built by the Moors in the 8th or 9th century. You can walk all along the castle walls and the views are amazing.

We then continued down the hill into Old Town Sintra or Centro Histórico de Sintra as it’s properly called. Old Town was very quaint with narrow cobblestone streets and lots of bakeries. We grabbed snacks and sangria at Cantinho do Lord Byron and walked around with glasses of sangria looking in the shops and eating Pastel De Nata.

Sintra is definitely worth spending a day (or two!) exploring and I’d love to go back and see the mansions and palaces we missed. I love hiking and being outdoors so Sintra definitely was my favorite part of our short stay in Lisbon.