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FrançaisThere are five monuments people mean by “the palaces in Sintra”, and you can comfortably do two of them in a day, three at a push. Pena Palace is the famous one and the one that now sells timed entry slots that go before the weekend; the Moorish Castle is the ruined fortress on the next peak; Quinta da Regaleira is the estate with the initiation well; Monserrate is the botanical one; and the National Palace of Sintra with its two conical chimneys sits in the town itself.
The practical answer that matters more than any of the history below: book Pena Palace online with a time slot before you travel, because the palace admits you only at a scheduled time and the good slots go first. Everything else in Sintra can be bought on the day.
We spent two nights in Sintra and visited the Moorish Castle, Pena, Quinta da Regaleira and Monserrate. Our tickets were complimentary, offered by the Câmara Municipal de Sintra, and the opinions here are mine, including the one about Pena. Sintra sits in the hills 29 km (18 miles) northwest of Lisbon, and the whole cultural landscape has been on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1995.
The palaces in Sintra at a glance
The five monuments are listed below with adult admission and what each one is actually for. Prices and opening times come from Parques de Sintra and Fundação Cultursintra, checked in September 2026.
| Monument | Adult ticket | Timed entry | Go for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Park and National Palace of Pena | €20 essential visit, €12 park only | Yes, palace entry at a scheduled time | The famous coloured palace and the interiors |
| The Moorish Castle | €12 | No | The ramparts and the view over Sintra |
| Quinta da Regaleira | Ticketed, timed slots | Yes, 30-minute slots | The initiation well and the tunnels |
| Park and Palace of Monserrate | €12 | No | The gardens and the plant collection |
| National Palace of Sintra | Ticketed | No | The chimneys, the azulejos and the town-centre location |
Two of them are on the same ridge, Pena and the Moorish Castle, and are usually done together. Quinta da Regaleira and the National Palace are both walkable from the town centre. Monserrate is 4 km (2.5 miles) out and needs the bus or a car.
Pena Palace
Pena Palace is the one everyone comes to Sintra for, and it is the one you have to plan around. The palace sits on the highest peak above the town in yellow, red, purple and ochre, and its 19th-century Romanticist architecture is the reason it appears on the cover of every book about Portugal.
Pena Palace tickets and timed entry
Entrance to the palace is only at a scheduled time, which is the single most important thing to know before you go. Parques de Sintra’s own ticketing puts you in a slot, and on busy days the slots for the middle of the day sell out. Book online, and if you are in Sintra for two days, take a morning slot on the second day rather than a midday slot on the first.
The prices below are Parques de Sintra’s own, checked in September 2026.
- Essential visit: €20 for adults aged 18 to 64, €18 for youths aged 6 to 17, €18 for over-65s and €65 for a family of two adults and two youths. This is park plus palace, and it is the ticket most people want.
- Visit to the park only: €12 for adults, €10 for youths and over-65s, €40 for a family. Worth considering if the palace slots have gone, because the park is large and the palace photographs better from outside anyway.
- Complete visit: €45 for adults, €20 for youths, €35 for over-65s and €115 for a family, adding the other monuments in the park.
- Guided visit to the palace: €75 for adults, and a theatrical visit at €95.
The park opens 09.00 to 19.00 with last admission at 18.00, and the palace 09.30 to 18.30 with the last ticket at 17.30. Getting there early matters more here than anywhere else in Sintra.
The history of Pena Palace
Pena Palace began as a monastery and became a fantasy. The Hieronymite monastery of Our Lady of Pena was built on the site by King Manuel I in 1511, and after the religious orders were suppressed it was abandoned and then wrecked by the earthquake of 1755. The marble chapel and the monastery’s foundations survived it.
Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, later King Ferdinand II, bought the ruin and started rebuilding in 1838, commissioning the German architect Baron Wilhelm Ludwig von Eschwege to design a palace as a gift for his wife, Queen Maria II. She died in 1853 and the couple never lived in it together.
Ferdinand had seen the castles of Bavaria and wanted Islamic and medieval elements worked into the design, which is where the vaulted arches and the ornate main façade window come from. The old monastery became the northern “Old Palace”, with the clock tower and the Queen’s Terrace with its cannon and sundial. The rest is the “New Palace”, with its cylindrical bastions and its palatial rooms. Over the entrance to the inner yard sits a triton, half man and half fish with vine branches for hair, representing the creation of the world from fire, water, sky and earth.
The king also laid out the park around it, with winding paths, pavilions, stone benches and hundreds of species of tree and plant brought in from around the world. At its western end is the Chalet of the Countess of Edla, built as a private retreat for Ferdinand II and his second wife, Elise Hensler, who inherited the estate when he died.
The Portuguese state bought the palace in 1889. Queen Amélie of Orléans was the last person to live in it, until the republican revolution of 1910 sent her into exile, after which Pena became a national monument and a museum. In 1994 it was restored and repainted in its original colours, pink for the Old Palace and ochre for the New.
Pena Palace: a bit of a disappointment
Pena was the palace I was looking forward to most and the one that let me down, and I do not think that was entirely the palace’s fault. We went on a day of thick fog, and the yellow, purple, orange and pink that make Pena famous need sun to work. It was also crowded enough that there was nowhere to stand and just look at the building.
That said, I did think the exterior could use a scrub. What I liked was the inside: there is a great deal of it, and the rooms give you a real sense of how the household lived, which several prettier palaces do not. The park was the other good part, with trails leading to a large cross, chapels and lakes.
If you have one clear day and one foggy one in Sintra, spend the clear one at Pena. The fog sits on that ridge far more often than the photographs suggest.
The Moorish Castle
The Moorish Castle is the ruined fortress on the ridge below Pena, and its walls are the reason to go. Castelo dos Mouros stands on two peaks of the Serra de Sintra, was made a National Monument in 1910, and is inside the same UNESCO-listed landscape as everything else here.
Castelo dos Mouros tickets and access
Adult admission is €12, with €10 for youths aged 6 to 17 and for over-65s, and €33 for a family of two adults and two youths. The castle opens 09.30 to 18.00, last ticket and last admission 17.30, and the ticket office closes for an hour at midday, though the vending machines keep working through it.
Private vehicles are not allowed up to the Moorish Castle. Parques de Sintra states this on the monument’s own page, so the drive that used to be possible is not an option. Take bus 434 from Sintra station, which loops up past the castle to Pena and back down, or walk the marked footpath up through the woods from the town, which takes about 45 minutes and is steep.
Do not walk up the road. It has no pavement, it winds, and it carries buses and coaches the whole way.
Castelo dos Mouros: a bit of history
The Moorish Castle was built by North African Moors in the 8th and 9th centuries as a fortress controlling the land routes between Lisbon, Sintra, Cascais and Mafra, on a peak overlooking the Tagus. What it was protecting was agricultural land, which was the valuable thing about Sintra at the time.
King Alfonso VI of Castile took it in 1093 and lost it again for want of men to hold it. When Dom Afonso Henriques, the first king of Portugal, took Lisbon in 1147, the Moors surrendered the castle to him, and he built the Church of St Peter of Canaferrim inside the walls.
The castle’s significant years were the first and second crusades. King Sancho I rebuilt it during his reign, and King Ferdinand I rebuilt it again in 1375. After that it lost its military purpose, its inhabitants moved down into the old village of Sintra, a small Jewish community lived there for a time until Manuel I expelled them, and the site was abandoned.
The 1755 earthquake finished the church and left the fortress in ruins. King Ferdinand II had the walls repaired and access roads built from 1839, and the castle became part of the landscape of Pena’s gardens. What survives of the church is two Romanesque doorways, traces of fresco near the altar and several medieval graves.
In 2009 a project called “Conquering the Castle” began restoring the site, with the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences at the Nova University of Lisbon and the Centre of Human and Social Sciences in Madrid. Archaeological work covered the tombs, the old stables, the Arms Square, the cistern and the keep, and much of what you can now walk through is the result.
Visiting Castelo dos Mouros
Visiting the Moorish Castle takes about an hour and the walls are the whole point. When you come through the entrance you can turn left for the ruins or go downhill into the woods; the woodland path drops a long way and you have to climb back up it, so most people go straight to the castle.
We had fog. That cost us the view over Sintra, which is the reason most people come up here, and it turned out to be a gift for someone with a serious fear of heights, because you can walk the ramparts without seeing how far down the drop is. The fog also did something to the ruins that sunshine does not.
Quinta da Regaleira
Quinta da Regaleira is a five-minute walk from the centre of Sintra, so you need neither a car nor a bus for it. It is the estate with the well you have seen on the internet, and it is the one to bring children to.
Quinta da Regaleira tickets and timed slots
Quinta da Regaleira is run by the Fundação Cultursintra rather than by Parques de Sintra, so it is a separate ticket bought separately. Entry is by timed slot, in 30-minute intervals, with an hour’s grace after your booked time. New prices came into force in January 2026, and secondary ticket sites disagree about what they are, so buy from regaleira.pt rather than from a reseller. The foundation has publicly warned about visitors arriving with tickets bought through unofficial sites.
Two things are currently restricted. The aquarium is closed for conservation work, and only the piso nobre, the main floor of the palace, is on the visitor route. Note also that Quinta da Regaleira is not covered by the free-entry-on-Sundays scheme for residents of Portugal, which applies only to state museums and monuments.
Quinta da Regaleira: just full of surprises
Quinta da Regaleira was the one I loved without reservation, and the only bad moment was realising we had seen all of it. The estate is built to surprise you: winding staircases, hidden paths, grottoes and underground tunnels dark enough that a torch is genuinely useful. You feel about nine years old within twenty minutes.
The exhibition in the main house is excellent and explains how the estate was built and what it was built to mean, which makes the gardens read differently afterwards. Outside, the famous initiation well descends through nine levels, taken to stand for the nine circles of hell, the nine sections of purgatory and the nine skies of paradise in Dante’s Divine Comedy.
There is a second, smaller well, the Unfinished Well, with straight flights of stairs connecting its circular floors, and the spacing of its landings and the number of its steps are said to follow Masonic principles. Both wells feed into a tunnel system running the length of the gardens, and both are sometimes called the Initiation Wells by people who believe they were used for Knights Templar initiation rites.
The Templars were dissolved by Pope Clement V in 1312, and the Freemasons revived their symbols and traditions in the 18th century. A compass set on a Templar cross sits at the bottom of the main well, which was also Carvalho Monteiro’s coat of arms, and some take that as evidence he was a Freemason with an interest in Rosicrucianism.
About Quinta da Regaleira
Quinta da Regaleira sits in the old quarter of Sintra, inside the UNESCO-listed cultural landscape. It belonged to the Viscountess of Regaleira before António Augusto Carvalho Monteiro bought it, a Brazilian-born coffee and gemstone magnate known as Monteiro dos Milhões, or Moneybags Monteiro.
Monteiro commissioned the Italian architect and set designer Luigi Manini to build the four-hectare estate, and Manini’s design mixes Roman, Gothic, Renaissance and Manueline. Construction ran from 1904 to 1910, ending as the Portuguese monarchy did. After Monteiro’s death the estate went to Waldemar d’Orey, stayed in his family until 1987, was bought by a Japanese company for private events, and was acquired by Sintra’s local government in 1997 and opened to the public in 1998.
The façade carries pinnacles, carved gargoyles and gothic turrets, the villa has five floors, and there is a chapel in the grounds; both villa and chapel are worked with frescoes, stucco and stained glass. But the reason to come is behind the house, where fountains, statues, grottoes, caves and ponds are arranged as a route with meanings attached, most of them pointing at the Templars, the Masons and alchemy.
Park and Palace of Monserrate
Monserrate is the botanical one, and the park is better than the palace. The estate sits about 4 km (2.5 miles) west of Sintra town, and the gardens run through a fern valley, a Mexican garden, a Japanese garden, a rose garden and a lawn, planted with species collected from across the world by 19th-century owners who were serious about it.
Check before you go: Parques de Sintra has restoration work under way on the palace roofs until the first quarter of 2027, which means scaffolding and a temporary covering over the building. The park is unaffected, and the park was the part I liked most anyway.
Adult admission is €12, with €10 for youths aged 6 to 17 and for over-65s, and €33 for a family of two adults and two youths, covering both park and palace. The park opens 09.00 to 19.00 with last admission at 18.00; the palace 09.30 to 18.00, last ticket 17.00. The ticket office closes for an hour at midday, with vending machines available.
National Palace of Sintra
The National Palace of Sintra is the one in the middle of town, and it is the easiest to fit in because you walk past it. Its two enormous white conical kitchen chimneys are the town’s landmark, and the interiors hold some of the oldest and finest azulejo tilework in Portugal, including the Magpie Room and the Swan Room.
It is a royal palace that was in continuous use from the 15th century to the late 19th, longer than any other in the country, and it is a completely different experience from Pena: older, plainer and far less crowded. If Pena’s slots have sold out, this is the substitute worth making.
How to get to Sintra and around it
Getting to Sintra from Lisbon means the train, and it takes 40 minutes. CP runs the Linha de Sintra from Rossio station in central Lisbon roughly every 20 minutes, also calling at Entrecampos and Oriente, and fares are a couple of euros each way, cheaper with Zapping credit on a Navegante card.
Do not bring a car. The roads inside the park are narrow and one-way, coaches use them constantly, parking near the monuments effectively does not exist in summer, and the Moorish Castle no longer admits private vehicles at all.
Getting around once you are there comes down to two bus routes and your legs. Bus 434 is the Pena circuit, running from Sintra station through the historic centre up to the Moorish Castle and Pena and back down. Bus 435 runs west from the centre to Quinta da Regaleira, Seteais and Monserrate. Both are hop-on services. Quinta da Regaleira and the National Palace are walkable from the station; nothing else is, comfortably.
Sintra is one of the strongest day trips from Lisbon, and it is also worth two nights if you can spare them, because everything on this page empties out after the last train back. If you are arriving in Portugal from elsewhere in Europe, compare train and coach fares before you fix your dates, and if you want to stay in the hills rather than commute up to them, compare places to stay in Sintra early, because the town has few beds for the number of people who want them.
Sintra palaces FAQ
How many palaces are there in Sintra?
Five monuments make up what people mean by the palaces of Sintra: Pena, the Moorish Castle, Quinta da Regaleira, Monserrate and the National Palace of Sintra. There are more inside the wider cultural landscape, including the Convent of the Capuchos and the Chalet of the Countess of Edla, but those five are the ones almost everyone visits.
Which palace in Sintra should you visit if you only have time for one?
Pena Palace if you want the famous one and Quinta da Regaleira if you want the one you will enjoy most. Pena has the architecture, the colours and the view; Regaleira has tunnels, wells and hidden paths, costs less, needs no bus and is a far better day with children.
Do you need to book Sintra palace tickets in advance?
You need to book Pena Palace in advance, because entry to the palace is by scheduled time slot and the middle of the day sells out. Quinta da Regaleira also works on 30-minute slots. The Moorish Castle, Monserrate and the National Palace can be bought on the day.
Can you visit all the palaces in Sintra in one day?
You can visit two comfortably and three at a push. The bus between them is slow and the queues are not, so a realistic day is Pena plus the Moorish Castle, or Quinta da Regaleira plus the National Palace, and two days if you want Monserrate as well.
How much are tickets to the Sintra palaces?
Adult admission is €20 for Pena including the park, €12 for the Moorish Castle, €12 for Monserrate and €12 for Pena Park alone, according to Parques de Sintra in September 2026. Quinta da Regaleira is run by a different foundation and priced separately.
WonderfulWanderings Pro Tips
The 5 tips below come from the two days we spent visiting the Sintra palaces and from re-checking every ticket, opening time and access rule against Parques de Sintra and Fundação Cultursintra in September 2026.
- Book Pena Palace’s time slot before you leave home. Entry to the palace is only at a scheduled time, and the middle of the day goes first. If the slots have gone, the park-only ticket at €12 still gets you the terraces and the outside of the building, which is what most people photograph anyway.
- You can no longer drive up to the Moorish Castle. Parques de Sintra states that private vehicles are not authorised. Bus 434 from Sintra station is the way up. Do not walk the road: it has no pavement and the coaches use the full width of it.
- Take a torch to Quinta da Regaleira. The tunnels between the wells and the grottoes are genuinely dark, and a phone torch is the difference between feeling your way and seeing what you are walking through.
- Expect Monserrate’s palace to be under scaffolding until early 2027. Roof restoration is under way, with a temporary covering over the building. The gardens are unaffected, and the gardens are the reason to go.
- Give Pena the clear day and the Moorish Castle the foggy one. Fog on that ridge is common and it takes Pena’s colours away completely. It does the opposite for the castle ruins, and it also means you can walk the ramparts without seeing the drop.
About the author. This guide is written and maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team. Wonderful Wanderings was founded in 2012 by Sofie Couwenbergh, and the first-hand notes on Pena, the Moorish Castle, Quinta da Regaleira and Monserrate come from the two nights she spent in Sintra, with tickets provided by the Câmara Municipal de Sintra. The team covers Portugal for independent travellers, including the palaces, the tours, the trains and the hotels worth booking, and re-checks the ticket prices, opening times and access rules on this page against Parques de Sintra when they change.
