7 Days in Lisbon and Beyond

Pena Palace draws thousands of visitors a day in peak season, and the walk-up queue between 11am and 3pm can run two to three hours, so the single most useful thing in this whole itinerary is booking a morning entry slot before you book anything else. A full week based in Lisbon gives you room for the city plus four genuinely different day trips and a beach day, without the Sintra-and-Cascais-in-one-afternoon mistake that wrecks shorter, rushed versions. For the city alone over a full week, see our 7-day Lisbon itinerary ; for a tighter version of this same day-trip spine, our 5-day itinerary drops the beach day.

Book these before you go:

Day Focus
1 Arrival, Baixa, Chiado, Alfama
2 Sintra
3 Cascais
4 Setubal and Arrabida
5 Obidos
6 Beach day: Carcavelos or Costa da Caparica
7 Porto verdict, slow finish, departure

Day 1: Arrival, Baixa and Alfama

Land at Humberto Delgado Airport; the Metro Red Line into Baixa takes 25-30 minutes, single fare 1.90 EUR or 1.72 EUR loaded onto a Navegante card’s Zapping balance, Aerobus stopped running in 2022 so don’t plan around it. Check into Baixa or Chiado, then walk Rossio Square, Praca do Comercio, and the narrow lanes of Alfama, Lisbon’s oldest surviving neighbourhood. Ride Tram 28 early morning or after 6pm if you want the classic route, not midday, it’s the city’s most reliably worked pickpocket run.

Is Belem worth fitting into a trip built around day trips? Not really. Both monuments run timed entry now and sit a tram ride outside the centre, easily half a day once you count travel and queueing, better spent resting between the longer days ahead. Our full Lisbon guide covers Belem properly if you extend the city portion of a future trip.

Day 2: Sintra

Train from Rossio, direct and frequent through the morning, about 40 minutes, 2.45 EUR one way. Book Pena Palace’s timed entry through the official Sintra parks site three to five days ahead in peak season; popular morning windows sell out that far in advance. Full palace and park access runs 20 EUR, park-only 14 EUR. Bus 434 covers the station-to-gate stretch, 4.10 EUR one way, 7.10 EUR round trip, or an unlimited day pass at 13.50 EUR, roughly double the stale ~6.90 EUR figure some guides still quote. Pick two of Pena Palace, the Moorish Castle, and Quinta da Regaleira, not all three, Sintra’s hills and cobblestones eat time faster than the map suggests.

Day 3: Cascais

A separate train line from Cais do Sodre, about 40 minutes, roughly 2.25-2.45 EUR each way. Walk the seafront promenade to Boca do Inferno, timing your visit within two hours of high tide for real spray rather than quiet rocks, and treat the afternoon as a genuine change of pace from Sintra’s crowded paths.

Day 4: Setubal and Arrabida

Best by car or an organized tour, roughly an hour south along the Arrabida coast. A dolphin-watching trip on the Sado estuary runs around 40 EUR for 2.5 hours, tracking a resident bottlenose population of roughly thirty animals, one of only three such resident colonies left in Europe, sighting rates above 95%. Eat choco frito, fried cuttlefish, in Setubal town itself, the local specialty.

Day 5: Obidos

Skip the direct train, a slow regional service over two hours running only a few times a day. The Rodotejo express bus from Campo Grande station is the right call, about an hour, roughly 9.45 EUR each way, no return fare sold so buy two singles. Obidos is a walled medieval hill town, small enough to see properly in a morning.

Day 6: Beach Day

Carcavelos is the closest proper beach to the city, easy by train from Cais do Sodre, good for a half-day. For a longer stretch of sand and better surf conditions, Costa da Caparica across the river has more room to spread out and rents boards if you want to try. Have dinner in Almada near the Ponte 25 de Abril, the suspension bridge often compared to San Francisco’s Golden Gate for its design and colour, with some of the best views back across the Tagus at dusk.

Day 7: A Porto Verdict, Then Home

Is Porto worth adding to a trip like this? Not as a day trip. It’s roughly three hours each way by train, turning “one more city” into six hours on a train and a rushed few hours on the ground. If Porto genuinely interests you, give it its own separate 2-3 days on a future trip rather than squeezing it into a Lisbon-based week.

Use the morning for souvenir shopping, a last coffee, or backfilling anything missed earlier in the week, Alfama’s smaller ceramics shops tend to have better prices than the tourist strip near Rossio. Head to the airport with buffer for metro delays during peak commute hours.

Transportation: A Navegante card loaded with Zapping covers metro, tram, bus, ferry, and the trains out to Sintra and Cascais, load it once and top up rather than buying single tickets each ride. Tips: Ginjinha, the sour cherry liqueur served in small chocolate cups near Rossio, is a cheap, genuinely good local ritual, not a tourist gimmick. Watch your bag on Tram 28 more than anywhere else in the city, that’s where the pickpocketing complaints concentrate.