Sintra's history runs deeper than its famous palace roofline: a 1147 Reconquest parish, Roman inscriptions from the surrounding villas, friars in cork-lined granite cells, and the 19th-century foreigners whose estates earned the 1995 UNESCO listing.
Founded after Afonso Henriques took Sintra from Muslim rule in 1147, this Gothic parish church kept its 13th-century nave, pointed arches and worn medieval tomb slabs through the post-1755 earthquake repairs. Usually open 10:00-17:00.
Sintra's second post-Reconquest parish, first raised in the 12th century, collapsed in the 1755 earthquake and rebuilt with a neo-Manueline front in 1911. Inside are 17th-century azulejo panels and gravestones of local nobility.
Built over an excavated Roman villa and a 6th-century basilica, this museum holds one of Iberia's richest collections of Roman inscriptions — roughly 200 carved stones gathered from the Sintra hinterland. Tue-Sun, 10:00-18:00.
Franciscan friars cut eight cells straight into the granite in 1560 and lined them with cork against the damp; never more than a dozen monks lived here until the 1834 dissolution. Doorways are barely 1.4 m high. Entry €12.
Coffee millionaire António Augusto Carvalho Monteiro and Italian set designer Luigi Manini built this Manueline-revival estate between 1904 and 1910 as a coded landscape of Templar, Masonic and alchemical symbols across nine terraces.
Dutch consul Daniel Gildemeester built this neoclassical house in 1787 with fortune from the Portuguese diamond monopoly. The triumphal arch linking its two wings was added in 1802 for a royal visit, not for the 1808 Convention of Sintra.
Gerard de Visme leased the hill in 1790 and William Beckford rented it after; Sir Francis Cook rebuilt the palace in Mughal-Gothic style from 1858 with architect James Knowles. The plasterwork Music Room gallery is the showpiece.
Luigi Manini designed this Romantic-revival villa around 1890 for hotelier Victor Sassetti, mixing Tuscan tower and Portuguese vernacular. Its terraced footpath was reopened in 2013 as a public route down to the historic centre.
The uphill village grew around a 12th-century parish and its centuries-old fairground. The museum occupies a former watermill on the stream, holding bronzes and drawings by sculptors Artur and Pedro Anjos Teixeira.
Founded in 1931 to save a collapsing appellation, this cooperative still presses Ramisco grapes from ungrafted vines rooted in deep coastal sand — the soil that stopped phylloxera when it wiped out the rest of Europe.
Mainland Europe's westernmost point, lit since 1772 by one of Portugal's earliest purpose-built lighthouses. The stone pillar with Camões' line about where the land ends and the sea begins was raised here in 1979.
The electric tramway from Ribeira de Sintra to the coast opened in 1904 to carry Lisbon holidaymakers to the sea, and still rattles 13 km down the same single track in restored early-20th-century cars.