A day trip to Sintra is on every Lisbon, Portugal must-do list.  Only 30 minutes outside of Lisbon, the town of Sintra offers a number of activities, notably touring Pena Palace and the Moorish Castle.  Here’s everything you need to know about visiting these two attractions.  

For more on Lisbon, check out our guide to Three Days in Lisbon. 

How to get to Sintra

While there are public transportation options, Uber is the easiest and most direct option.  Lisbon to Sintra via Uber cost us just under €30 and takes about 30 minutes.  

When to Visit

Sintra is by far the most popular day trip from Lisbon, which means hoards of tour busses.  Pena Palace is especially busy, so we recommend stopping there first.  

Depart Lisbon around 8:15 AM to drive to Sintra and arrive at Pena Palace before the 9 AM opening time.  It’s easy to purchase tickets for both Pena Palace and the Moorish Castle at the self service kiosk once you get there.  From the ticket point, there’s a short walk to the palace.  

Explore the exterior of the palace immediately at the opening time.  The tour groups will do the interior tour first, so if ou arrive right at 9 AM, you’ll pretty much have the exterior to yourself.  Within 15-20 minutes, the palace and its exterior will be packed so take advantage of this time. 

Pena Palace Interior

After exploring the exterior of the palace we ventured inside.  Unfortunately, the interior was packed wall to wall with tour groups, so I really did not enjoy that part of the palace. The interior was pretty, but there were so many people and tour guides vying for attention that you could hardly see it.  We ultimately just found ourselves rushing to escape. 

Moorish Castle

After concluding our visit to Pena Palace, we followed the signs to walk to the Moorish Castle.  Unlike Pena Palace, the Moorish Castle was pretty empty!  We ran into maybe 15 other people while we were exploring.  The Moorish Castle is essentially ruins with defense towers and walls to hike along.  We enjoyed our time here and the beautiful views from the castle.  

Timing

We spent about 2.5 hours exploring both Pena Palace and the Moorish Castle.  You can definitely spend more time – we really rushed through the palace interior and largely skipped the extensive gardens.  There’s also a lot to do in the town of Sintra.  Since we only had 3 days in Lisbon, we chose to do just the Palace and Castle and head back to Lisbon for the rest of the day. 

Thoughts

We really enjoyed visiting both the Palace and Castle!  I don’t typically love castle tours – i.e. Neuschwanstein – since the often are over touristy and feel theme parkish.  Pena Palace definitely had a theme-park feel, but it’s such a unique looking place, it’s worth exploring if you get there early enough to beat some of there busses.  

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