Sintra

People have lived in the Sintra hills since the Palaeolithic, and a late Bronze Age settlement stood where the Castle of the Moors is today. The Romans counted the area within the territory of Olisipo, the later Lisbon, and under Moorish rule the geographer al-Bakri described Sintra as a town dependent on Lisbon, "permanently submerged in a fog that never dissipates". The castle surrendered for good in November 1147, a month after Afonso Henriques took Lisbon with the help of crusaders, and in 1154 he granted the town its charter. Medieval Sintra had a Sephardic community with its own synagogue and quarter.

For the next five centuries the town was a royal retreat. The palace in its centre was one of the court's principal summer residences until the end of the 17th century: John I decided there to conquer Ceuta in 1415, Afonso V was born and died there, and the deposed Afonso VI was held prisoner there until his death in 1683. Manuel I rebuilt the parish church and in 1511 founded a monastery on the highest peak. The 1755 earthquake destroyed much of the town centre.

From the late 18th century Sintra became a place of Romantic pilgrimage — Lord Byron's "glorious Eden" — and wealthy foreigners and Portuguese aristocrats built estates such as Monserrate. In 1838 King-Consort Ferdinand II bought the ruined monastery and began the Pena Palace, the railway from Lisbon opened in 1887, and the millionaire Carvalho Monteiro built Quinta da Regaleira early in the 20th century. A municipal plan of 1949 protected the old town, while the land towards Lisbon filled with dense suburbs. The town's cultural landscape is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Sintra's identity rests on its landscape and its literary fame. Camões wrote of its mountains in The Lusiads as a land of water nymphs, Byron praised it, and the novelist Eça de Queirós set scenes of Os Maias and The Mystery of the Sintra Road here. From the later 19th century musicians, painters and architects settled in the town, among them the composer Alfredo Keil and the architect Raul Lino, and the painter Vieira da Silva and the writer Ferreira de Castro, whose museum is in the town, later lived in the area.

The palaces and parks are looked after by Parques de Sintra, and tourism dominates the old centre: its sites received about 3.2 million visitors in 2017. The town has also long been a film set — scenes of The Ninth Gate, The Count of Monte Cristo and the 1996 Gulliver's Travels were shot among its palaces. Each year the European Central Bank holds its Forum on Central Banking here.

Local life carries on beneath the crowds. Sport União Sintrense, founded in 1911, plays football, the Hockey Club de Sintra is known for roller hockey and artistic roller skating, and the villages of the western slopes keep their wine and farming traditions.

The municipality of Sintra had 395,528 people in 2023, making it one of the most populous in Portugal, but very few of them live in the historic town. Most are concentrated in the south-east, in the Queluz–Agualva-Cacém–Mem Martins corridor along the railway line and the IC19 motorway, where blocks of seven storeys or more house commuters to Lisbon. Sintra has the youngest population structure in the Lisbon metropolitan area, and around a fifth of those born outside the town are from abroad.

The economy is mostly services, retail and construction, with some industry, and tourism is central to the old town and the mountains. The municipality is also among the wealthiest in Portugal and has a large foreign community, much of it living in villas and estates on the hills and along the coast.

For residents of the old centre, daily life means sharing narrow streets with tour groups, buses and tuk-tuks, especially in summer. Many people commute to Lisbon on the frequent trains, while the coastal villages of Colares, Azenhas do Mar and Praia das Maçãs fill with summer residents and day trippers in the warm months. In the 2025 local elections Marco Almeida of the PSD became mayor.

Sintra is best known for its pastries. The travesseiro de Sintra, a "pillow", is a puff pastry filled with a cream of almonds, sugar and egg yolks with cinnamon, often dusted with sugar; the old Piriquita pastry shop is the most famous place to buy them. The queijada de Sintra is a small tart with a crisp case and a filling of fresh cheese, sugar, eggs and cinnamon, sometimes with lemon zest — Sintra's version is among the best known of Portugal's queijadas, and shops in the old town sell them.

Restaurants in the town and the surrounding villages serve the Portuguese repertoire of grilled fish, meat and daily specials, and seafood is the speciality on the coast at Azenhas do Mar and Praia das Maçãs. Across the Lisbon region, set lunches in small restaurants remain the cheapest way to eat.

Colares produces a rare wine. Its vines grow in sand dunes near the sea that protect them from the Atlantic wind, and the appellation holds the country's highest classification of origin. Suburban growth has shrunk the vineyards from about 2,500 acres in the 1940s to around 50 acres, and the regional winery in Colares is a place to taste it.