Exploring Sintra, Portugal: A Complete Travel Guide
Trains from Lisbon's Rossio station reach Sintra in about forty minutes, and most of the passengers get off already holding their phone up against the window. The town sits in the hills at the end of the line, and from the platform the old National Palace looks close enough to touch, its two white kitchen chimneys visible over the rooftops.
Exploring Sintra in Portugal usually means a choice, made early, about how much queueing you're willing to absorb. There's a bus from the station forecourt that loops past the main palaces. It's crowded. On a Tuesday morning in June the queue for it ran twenty metres along the pavement, and a woman near the front had brought a folding stool.
The alternative is to walk, which most people manage for the first stretch and then regret.
Buses, tickets and the price of convenience
One return ticket on the 434 bus costs around 7 euros and will get you to the Pena Palace gates in fifteen minutes when the road isn't clogged. It frequently is. The single-lane stretch beyond the town centre means standing still while a coach edges past in the other direction, and the drivers wait it out with the engine running.
If you're planning to see two or three places, the combined ticket for Pena and the Moorish Castle is the sensible buy at about 20 euros, though it doesn't cover the bus and doesn't get you out of the timed-entry system at Pena. That system is worth knowing about: you book a slot, you turn up in that slot, and arriving late means a separate queue that moves slowly and with visible resentment.
Wear proper shoes. The cobbles round the old town are slippery even dry, and the pavements narrow to the width of one person and a shoulder bag.
Pena Palace and the terrace that swallows an hour
The palace is a nineteenth-century confection of yellow and red, built on the site of a ruined monastery and photographed from the same six angles by everyone who visits. I'd say it's worth the fuss, though the interior rooms go past in a blur of tiled walls and roped-off furniture. The terraces are the part that stays with people.
Allow ninety minutes for the building itself and another thirty for the walk through the park to the Valley of the Lakes, where the paths dip and rise through tree ferns and rhododendrons planted by a homesick king. There's no cafe down there. There are ducks, and a small tiled bridge, and a bench that had lost two of its slats when I last passed.
The park takes up a good forty per cent of the visit and most of the photographs aren't of it.
Walk down from Pena on the signposted path to the Moorish Castle and you'll be at the ramparts in twenty minutes, no bus required. The walls are uneven, the steps worn into shallow bowls, and the wind up there will pull a hat off a head without asking.
The Moorish Castle, and the town below
The castle is essentially a set of walls along a ridge, and the pleasure of it is scrambling about the battlements to look down on the town. On a clear day you can pick out the National Palace's chimneys and the line of the harbour road away to the west. The boards along the walkway explain, in Portuguese and English, what the archaeological digs turned up, which is mostly pottery and bones.
Back in the centre, the National Palace is the one sight that doesn't require a bus and rarely requires a timed slot. It's smaller than it looks from the station, and the swan room (yes, swans on the ceiling, twenty-seven of them) is over in under ten minutes. The kitchen with its two conical chimneys is the better room. Medieval kitchens so rarely survive.
Pastries merit a mention. The travesseiro, a rolled almond pastry dusted with sugar, sells for about 1.50 euros at the cafes near the palace, and the queues outside the famous one on the main square are unnecessary: the little place on the lane up toward the station does the same thing for the same price with a third of the wait. I'm not sure the famous one is even using a different recipe, though I couldn't get close enough to compare.
There are souvenir shops selling fridge magnets of Pena in varying degrees of accuracy, and a shop devoted entirely to cork handbags, and a man near the station who sells roasted chestnuts from a drum in autumn.
You'll notice I've said nothing about Quinta da Regaleira. The estate with the initiation wells, the underground tunnels, the inverted towers you descend into on a spiral staircase: it's the other big draw, and it deserves its own visit rather than a slot squeezed between Pena and lunch. Booking is separate and the site closes earlier than the palaces do.
When to go, and how long to give it
Weekdays outside July and August are noticeably quieter; the bus queue on a wet Wednesday in November consisted of myself and a man from Porto who wanted to talk about football. Mist is common in the mornings and burns off by eleven, if it burns off at all. I'd hedge my bets on the weather between October and March and carry a jacket regardless, since the hilltop temperature runs a good three or four degrees below the town.
A single day covers Pena and the Moorish Castle comfortably. Two days lets you add Regaleira and the Monserrate gardens without the afternoon turning into a forced march. Three is generous, and gives you time to sit on a wall and eat a pastry without checking a bus timetable.
Getting back to Lisbon is the easy part, assuming you don't leave it until the last train, which leaves Rossio-bound just after midnight and fills up with people who have done exactly that. The station at Sintra has a small cafe, a ticket machine that takes cards, and a timetable board that updates in real time.
One more thing about the buses: they stop running the loop at around eight in the evening, and the walk back down from Pena in the dark takes about forty minutes on a road without much of a pavement. Worth a thought if you've booked a late entry slot.
The ticket office at the station sells a combined bus-and-palace card for a few euros less than buying separately, and the woman at the counter will draw the route on a paper map if you ask nicely, which she did for me, in blue biro, with an arrow that pointed the wrong way up the hill.
Further reading: Sintra on Wikipedia.
