We arrived by train. It is short walk from train station to center so there is no need to take bus or taxi.

It was after rain, so streets were wet. But we were optimists, because according to weather forecast rain should be over at time of our arrival.

Moorish castle above Sinta.

National Palace.

National Palace.

If you want original Ginjinha served in chocolate cups, come to square near National Palace. I am a bit lost in this photo, but it should be somewhere in those buildings.

Pena Palace

Pena Palace is probably the best known place in Sintra. That was our first destination. We started walking up to hill, then realized the road goes around whole hill and it is more than 2 kilometers. We decided we need to be smarter about that. Coincidentally this realization happened just about 50m after we passed along bus stop. We returned back to it and even before we could properly study time table, hop-on hop-off arrived. So we hopped on. That was part of the problem, but we have learned that only later.

When we arrived to Pena Palace, we have bought discounted tickets for Pena, Moorish Castle and "something else". I will get back to it in later.

We walked up through forest up to castle and we could start our exploration.

View from Pena to surrounding hills.

We were out of luck with sunshine. It would enhance our experience a lot. Pena Palace is colorful, consists from interesting shapes so sun could cast nice shadows which would help with better 3D definition. Maybe I got it, what people meant with raining here. Picturesque palace changes to disappointing and wet experience.

It was full of tourists and pupils. We paused outside and while we ate some refreshment we have brought, the worst part of crowd (school) have left.

We got occasional sunshine, but that was more like an exception.
    

Moorish Castle in distance.

This place was full of people. I took 7 photos and merged them together to get rid of most of them.

Decoration from inside of palace.

To Moorish Castle

We have realized we have spent quite long time inside. We still planned to see 2 other places. So we hurried down and hopped on parked bus. It was waiting for more than 5 minutes, then started up and we realized even this was last stop we were not returning back to Moorish Castle which we foolishly skipped while going to Pena Castle. It was circular route.

We have returned to center, hopped off and walked to "main square", because we did not want to go all the way to train station. Especially in traffic jam. We needed to wait considerably longer time than before until bus arrived and we could go up the hill we've been before.

Entrance to Moorish Castle.

Moorish Castle

As you can see at previous photos, Moorish castle is surrounded by very nice forest with huge rocks and amazing flowers. I wonder if it was continuation of Moors' traditions or it was just new "redecoration" :-)

But whole ruins of castle are also very nice. They also offer very nice views. I would say, views from Moorish Castle are better than from Pena Castle.

Pena. I waited for about 10 minutes for sun to peek out, but then I needed to move on. There was still 3rd place to visit at that day.

As following photos show, flowers can be found also inside of castle. I am aware this post contains more photos of flowers, that all posts together from Madeira do, but I simply like how these photos turned out ;-) There might be something about the idea that flowers should be photographed during overcast days.

Down the hill

I said before we had tickets for three places. But I failed to name the third place. Thing is, I forgot what it was supposed to be. Because we did not get there.

When we returned to bus stop, we arrived shortly after bus left at 17:20. So was patiently waited for next one. But a group of people came and asked us how to get to town. "By bus, that's how" was gist of our response. "But we missed last one. See that notice on time table." Yeah, we noticed it before, but somehow failed to realize the marathon or something like that happens today. Crap. So we decided to walk down to city. Our new friends happily followed our lead back to Moorish Castle area where we have seen footpath leading to town.

That was end of our hope for visiting 3 places in Sintra. It was too far from Sintra to get there without bus. Alternative plan was a nice dinner. That worked for me and Peter too.