Sintra

The National Palace of Pena crowns the highest ridge, a riot of ochre, crimson and tiled turrets stacked over the ruins of a 16th-century Hieronymite monastery. King Ferdinand II, the "artist king", acquired the site in 1838 and had the German engineer Baron von Eschwege turn it into a summer residence between 1842 and 1854, mixing Neo-Gothic, Neo-Manueline, Neo-Islamic and Neo-Renaissance styles with cheerful abandon. The audio guide walks you through the drawbridge, the cloister and the terraces, where on a clear day you can see the Atlantic.

Give yourself time for Pena Park too, over 200 hectares of forest that Ferdinand planted with trees from across the world, including sequoias and ginkgoes. Hidden in the trees is the Chalet of the Countess of Edla, the alpine-style retreat Ferdinand built for the opera singer he married after the queen's death, trimmed with cork and bark.

Facing Pena across a saddle of rock is The Moorish Castle, whose ramparts snake along the ridge like a miniature Great Wall. The Moors held Sintra, which they called Xintara, until Afonso Henriques took it in 1147; walk the walls and the audio guide fills in what the garrison would have seen from here.

Down in the town, the National Palace of Sintra is the one you cannot miss, thanks to the two enormous white conical chimneys over its kitchens. The royal family summered here for centuries, and its painted rooms, from the Swan Room to the Magpie Room, tell the story of the Portuguese court better than any museum.

A ten-minute walk from the centre, Quinta da Regaleira is the estate of António Carvalho Monteiro, "Monteiro the Millionaire", who bought it in 1892 and hired the Italian architect Luigi Manini to build a Gothic-fronted palace bristling with pinnacles and gargoyles, completed around 1910. The gardens are the real draw: grottoes, a chapel floored with the Order of Christ cross and pentagrams, and tunnels that link a waterfall lake to the famous Initiation Well, an inverted tower 27 metres deep whose spiral staircase descends in nine flights. Whether the symbolism is Templar, Masonic or Dante's nine circles, the audio guide lays out the theories while you spiral down into the dark.

West of town the crowds thin out. The Park and Palace of Monserrate is an Anglo-Moorish confection built for the English merchant Gerard Devisme in the 1790s and reimagined by Sir Francis Cook in the 19th century, with a lace-like Music Room and gardens of exotic plants fed by the mountain damp. Further into the forest, the Capuchos Convent is its opposite: a 16th-century Franciscan retreat where the cells are lined with cork and the doorways are built for monks who had renounced everything. On the far rim of the ridge, the Sanctuary of Peninha sits on a bare crag with views down to the coast.

The ridge ends at Cape Roca, the westernmost point of mainland Europe, where cliffs more than 100 metres high drop into the Atlantic beneath a lighthouse that has been lit since 1772. Northward the coast softens into beaches: Praia das Maçãs, reached by the heritage tram from Sintra, and Azenhas do Mar, a whitewashed village stacked down a cliff above a natural sea pool.

Sintra has its own pastries, and Casa Piriquita in the historic centre is the classic address for queijadas, small cinnamon-scented cheese tarts, and the pillow-shaped travesseiros. The village of Colares on the road to the coast gives its name to one of Portugal's oldest demarcated wine regions, where vines grow in sand dunes. The Eléctrico de Sintra tram links the town to Praia das Maçãs along an 11.5-kilometre scenic line; in town the 434 bus loops from the station to the Moorish Castle and Pena, though many visitors simply walk up through the woods with their audio guide playing.