Best day trip from Lisbon

Hey there Wanderlusters 🤗

This is the second blog post in my series about Lisbon! Two weeks ago I went on a birthday getaway trip to escape London and get some fresh air in a new city. Enter Lisbon 💃🏻 If you are looking for a full city guide you can find that HERE.

Part of the reason I chose Lisbon was because there were quite a few other smaller towns nearby in Portugal I wanted to check out as well. Although you can rent a car or take the train/bus to most of these places, I highly suggest doing a day trip with a tour guide to let someone else drive you around and just relax while enjoying the sights!

My tour was a group of eight of us (mostly solo travelers) and we spent about nine hours going all around the Sintra region! Below was our route & ideas for your own day trip outside of the city.

Sintra day trip

The tour guide came and picked me up from my Airbnb around 8 AM. I was the second one to get picked up so we went around to grab the others from their hotels and started making our way west to the central region. While I didn’t mind the early start, finding a coffee shop open on a Sunday morning before 8 AM wasn’t feasible, so my only regret was not making coffee before we left.

First stop was Pena Palace. It was about a 45 minute drive from Lisbon to get there. As I mentioned, you can grab a train that takes you into the town, but to get up the hill to the palace you would have to either hike or hitch a ride on the bus.

To enter the outer grounds for the palace it costs €7, and then it’s an additional €6 to tour the inside (€14 total). I chose to do both, but personally the inside was not impressive and very small. The Palace itself though and the magnitude of its scale is breathtaking. What was remarkable to me was how vivid the yellow red and blue colors are on the exterior, which makes you think how the heck did they get such vibrant colors of paint back in the day? Our tour guide was very smart to have that be our first stop because after the 9:30am tour, the crowds were spilling in and it was overwhelming (as you can see in the first photo people are behind you everywhere).

Next stop was Quinta da Regaleira, which is a very different style of architecture compared to the first palace. It cost €10 to enter the grounds which also included walking through the initiation well (see photos). I loved this stop the most because the grounds themselves were just as beautiful as the palace. There are different nooks and crannies throughout the palace grounds including gardens honoring Greek mythology Gods, a church, and even a fountain of youth. We spent about an hour and a half here exploring and getting a guided tour from our driver.

From these two palaces, we then journeyed down the mountain and west to the farthest western point in continental Europe. Definitely glad it was just a pitstop and not something where we went out of our way to because it’s just a monument and a lighthouse. The cliffs were pretty though contrasting with the turquoise water below.

Our final stop of the day was visiting the beach town called Cascais. Known for having some of the most expensive real estate in all of Portugal, it gave me southern France meets Spanish Catalonia vibes. We had the most gorgeous lunch from this restaurant we found down a side alley with delicious fresh seafood and some strong sangrias which I wasn’t mad at haha. And of course you can’t go to a beach town without having some amazing gelato.

Finally we made the journey back to Lisbon, passing by the Torre de Belem, which dropped me back off at my Airbnb around 5 PM. I felt like this was the perfect way to see some sites outside of the city and still be back in time to enjoy a sunset drink and dinner!

What are your thoughts on Sintra, worth the day trip? Let me know in the comments which palace you liked more!

Sincerely,

Sarah

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