The 7 palaces and gardens of Sintra, ranked

The ranking, and the rule that decides your day

Sintra has more ticketed estates than any sane visitor can see, they are spread over steep wooded hills, and the buses between them crawl. So the useful ranking is not which palace is prettiest but which repays the ticket, the travel time and the queue. Two per day is the honest maximum; three only if two are next to each other in the town centre. Tickets run €10 to €24, and most sites now sell timed entry online at a small discount, which also lets you skip the ticket-office line that eats forty minutes on a spring Saturday.

Getting there: trains from Rossio station every twenty to thirty minutes, forty minutes, around €2.40 each way with a rechargeable card. From Sintra station the 434 loop bus does the historic centre, the Moorish castle and Pena for roughly €13.50 as a hop-on ticket; the 435 runs to Regaleira, Seteais and Monserrate for about €7. Both crawl in summer. Walking up the Vila Sassetti trail from the town to the castle is free, shaded, takes 45 minutes and is more pleasant than the bus.

1. Quinta da Regaleira — the one to book first

A millionaire's esoteric fantasy built between 1904 and 1910: a neo-Manueline mansion in a four-hectare garden riddled with grottoes, tunnels, follies and the Initiation Well, a nine-storey inverted tower with a mossy spiral staircase that opens onto a dripping underground passage. It costs around €12 to €15 and it is the only Sintra estate where you spend your time exploring rather than shuffling behind a rope. Two hours minimum, three if you find all the tunnels. Go at 09:30 opening; the well is a single-file staircase and by noon it is a queue with a view of the back of somebody's head.

It beats Pena on this list because you can wander freely, because children treat it as a legitimate adventure playground, and because the crowd disperses across the grounds instead of funnelling through eight rooms. The catch is that the house interiors are modest and there is real up-and-down on wet stone, so the paths are unforgiving in trainers with worn soles. Ten minutes on foot downhill from the town centre, so you can do this first, walk back for lunch, and still have the afternoon for something else.

2. Pena Palace — worth it, on the right terms

Ferdinand II's 1840s romantic pile on the highest ridge, painted egg-yolk yellow and blood red, with a Manueline cloister from the original monastery inside and views from the Atlantic to the Tagus. Palace plus park costs in the region of €20 to €24 and entry is by half-hour timed slot, enforced. Park only is about half that. The interiors are genuinely good, particularly the kitchens and the Arab room, but they funnel three thousand people a day through narrow corridors and the last third of the route is a shuffle.

The way to enjoy it: book the earliest slot of the day, take the 434 up at opening or a €12 taxi from the station, do the interiors first, then walk the park downhill afterwards. The park is 85 hectares of ferns, camellias and Ferdinand's imported conifers, holds the Chalet da Condessa d Edla and the Cruz Alta viewpoint at 528 metres, and almost nobody walks it. Cloud sits on this ridge until midday for much of the year, so a foggy 09:00 slot can be a total loss of the view but a gain in atmosphere.

3. Monserrate and 4. Castelo dos Mouros

Monserrate, three kilometres west of town on the 435 bus route, is the quiet triumph of Sintra: a Mughal-Gothic pleasure palace of pierced plasterwork and a domed music room, set in a botanical garden laid out by an English merchant with a Mexican ravine, a fern valley, a Japanese section and lawns you can lie on. Around €12. Two hours, and you will pass perhaps fifty other people. If you have already done one crowded palace and want the day to end well, this is the one to add.

The Castelo dos Mouros, the 8th- to 10th-century Moorish walls snaking along the ridge above town, costs around €12 for what is essentially a long walk on a battlement with a spectacular view of Pena on the opposite crag. There are no interiors. It earns its place if you like ramparts and heights and have decent shoes; skip it if you are short on time or have a fear of exposed steps. It is free to look at from below, and the Vila Sassetti trail passes its gate, which makes it an easy add-on rather than a destination.

5. Palacio Nacional de Sintra and 6. Convento dos Capuchos

The two white conical chimneys in the middle of town belong to the oldest surviving royal palace in Portugal, occupied from the 15th century to 1910. Around €13. The reason to go in is the tilework, the finest and earliest in the country, plus the Magpie Room, the Swan Room ceiling and the kitchen beneath those chimneys, big enough to roast an ox. Ninety minutes, no hill to climb, and it is open when the weather has ruined the hilltops. On a rainy Sintra day this is the best ticket in town.

Convento dos Capuchos, ten kilometres out towards the coast, is a 1560 Franciscan hermitage where the monks lined tiny cork-clad cells into the rock. It costs around €10, takes forty minutes, and is the most affecting place in Sintra precisely because there is nothing to look at but poverty and moss. The problem is access: buses are sparse to non-existent, so it means a car or a taxi of around €20 each way from town. Go if you have wheels and a spare hour; otherwise accept you will miss it.

7. Palacio de Queluz — the escape valve

Queluz is not in Sintra at all, but it is on the same train line, twenty minutes from Rossio at Queluz-Belas station and a ten-minute walk. It is Portugal's answer to a small Versailles: a pink 18th-century summer palace with a mirrored throne room, a tiled canal for boating parties, box-hedge gardens and, most days, a fraction of the visitors. Around €10 to €12. Ninety minutes covers it comfortably. There is also a Portuguese School of Equestrian Art with morning training sessions and scheduled performances if you time it right.

Why it is on a Sintra list: when Sintra is heaving, which in July and August means from 10:30 every day, Queluz gives you a proper royal palace with room to breathe for half the money. It works as a stop on the way back to Lisbon in the late afternoon, since it stays open when the hilltops have shut. It also works as a full plan B when the fog is down and there is nothing to see from 500 metres up.

Eating, timings and the two-palace day that actually works

The town centre feeds people badly and expensively near the palace steps, and well two streets away. The old bakery on the main square sells travesseiros, the flaky almond pillows, at around €1.60, and queijadas at similar; get them warm mid-morning. For lunch, look at the small tascas along the road below the historic centre and the places up in Sao Pedro, where a fair main is €11 to €15. Do not plan to eat between 13:00 and 14:30 in high season without a booking, and do not eat inside the estates, where a sandwich is €8.

The day I would run: 08:20 train from Rossio, walk to Regaleira for the 09:30 opening, two hours there, walk back into town for lunch at 12:30, then a pre-booked 14:30 Pena slot by bus or taxi, and the park on foot afterwards, back on a 18:30 train. Skip Cabo da Roca unless the sky is clear; on a grey day it is a car park in the wind. Skip buying the five-site combined ticket for a single day, and skip tuk-tuk drivers quoting €50 for a hill you can climb in 45 minutes.