Beyond the palace queues, Sintra holds an esoteric garden built by an Italian opera-set designer, a Mughal-arched Victorian villa, a sculptor's studio-museum in a former watermill, and Portugal's finest Arab-revival interior at Monserrate.
Carvalho Monteiro's 1904 estate designed by Italian set-designer Luigi Manini: the 27m Initiation Well spirals down nine landings of Dante-coded steps into wet grottoes, with Templar and alchemical carvings across the chapel. Opens 09:30, last entry 18:30.
James Knowles Jr's 1858 villa for millionaire Francis Cook: a Mughal-Gothic-Moorish hybrid whose Music Room dome dissolves into carved plaster arabesques, with an alabaster-columned gallery running the full 60m spine of the house.
The neoclassical 1787 mansion built for Dutch consul Daniel Gildemeester, its two wings joined by a triumphal arch raised in 1802 for Prince João. Now the Tivoli Palácio de Seteais hotel, with fresco-painted salons by Jean Pillement's circle.
A converted 18th-century watermill on the Volta do Duche holding roughly 500 works by father-and-son sculptors Artur and Pedro Anjos Teixeira — plaster maquettes, bronze studies and the tools of Pedro's studio, moved here intact in 1976.
The Rinchoa home of caricaturist and ceramicist Tomás Leal da Câmara (1876-1948), preserved with his Paris-period lithographs of Zola and Rodin, art nouveau furniture he designed, and the tiled panels he fired in the garden kiln.
The 1862 bakery's second premises, opened when the original room could no longer hold the queues; queijadas here still follow the convent recipe of fresh cheese, cinnamon and a paper-thin flour crust rolled by hand each morning.
The former 1920s casino on Avenida Heliodoro Salgado, converted in 2015 into three floors of rotating contemporary exhibitions plus the Sintra municipal collection of 20th-century Portuguese painting and the town's photography archive.
Sintra's main stage, rebuilt in 1997 on the shell of the 1920s Teatro Carlos Manuel: an 850-seat Grande Auditório hosting the Sintra Festival's chamber concerts each June-July, plus year-round dance, jazz and Portuguese theatre.
The 1560 Franciscan hermitage where eight friars lived in cells hewn from granite boulders and lined with cork against the damp — the most austere counterpoint imaginable to Pena's polychromy, reached by a wooded lane above Monserrate.
The stepped lane behind the National Palace where azulejo painters, cork workers and filigree jewellers still hold ground-floor shops, running up to São Pedro de Penaferrim where the Feira de São Pedro fills the square on the 2nd and 4th Sunday.
Housed in the 1887 Sintra station building, whose neo-Manueline façade and painted azulejo panels are the exhibit as much as the signalling equipment, uniforms and rolling-stock models tracing the Lisbon line that made Sintra a day trip.
The 1931 cooperative cellar for Colares wine — Ramisco vines grown ungrafted in sand dunes, the only Portuguese vineyard phylloxera never reached. Tastings run through old-vine reds aged in chestnut casks in the original concrete lagares.