Our Hike & Wine suggestions take you to wonderful, local, award winning special vineyards of our region, where you can enjoy a guided tour and a wine tasting at the end of your walk. Best yet, there is a perfect walk for everyone:  there is a route for you, whether you wish to walk through the countryside, on the coast, or in the mountain. You can choose to walk just 5 kms or make it a day with a 15 km walk. Want to have lunch on the way? Also possible.

Following are some of our suggestions for you,

Through the mountain paths: Casa do Valle to Almoçageme and Casal Santa Maria or Adega Viuva Gomes, 13 kms.  Or 5,5 kms if you start near Monserrate palace.   There are nice little restaurants in the village for lunch or dinner.

From the Historic Center to the countryside of Janas: Casa do Valle to Quinta San Michel, 7.5 kms.  Lunch options in the nearby village.

The classic Colares roundtrip wine route:  15 kms in the Colares region in the villages, on the coast and in the in the pine forest starting and finishing at the Adega Regional of Colares. You can take the historic tram or a bus from Casa do Valle to the starting point.

These walks are great for you alone or for a group activity!

Take a look at short 1 minute videos on our YouTube Channel of what the walks and places look like.

And while you are at it, there are other little videos on walking in Sintra, our beaches and Casa do Valle!  Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive notifications on new suggestions for your Sintra adventures.

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1. They are some of the oldest wines in Portugal, dating back to year 1255
2. A large part of the vines grow deep in sand dunes – a detail that protected them from the 1865 phylloxera plague
3. They get their special taste from the harsh coastal climate (westernmost vineyards of continental Europe)
4. And now most recently: the world famous chef Gordon Ramsay just featured the Colares Wines in the National Geographic program Uncharted, calling the wine ‘one of the best kept secrets of Portugal’!  (watch the trailer of his visit here)

The Colares wines in Sintra are some of the oldest in Portugal

The Colares wine region is the smallest demarcated wine region of Portugal (DOC Colares). The wine culture goes back to 1255 when king D Afonso lll ordered wine to be planted. Supposedly the Ramisco vines came from northern France, Boulogne region, where the king had previously lived.

A large part of the Colares vines are grown in the sand dunes

Dug deep like in trenches covered with sand, the vines lay on top of the ground almost looking abandoned. There is no trellising systems so the vines grow low due to the sea winds and are protected by hand-made palisades of dried canes sewn together with wicker. They survived the 1865 plague of phylloxera, as the bug could not reach the roots through the thick of sand. Because of this, the Colares Ramisco vines are some of the oldest vines in Portugal.

The uniqueness of the taste of these wines is due to the closeness of the sea

The coastal climate is very harsh, with moderate temperatures, strong sea winds and a high percentage of air moisture.

The Ramisco wines take a long time to mature, a minimum of 18 months, but often up to 6-8 years, in wooden barrels and the bottle. Its aroma is complex, with hints of nuts and red fruits. The production is quite small, with no more than 20 000 bottles per year. The typical white Colares wine is Malvasia (of Greek origin); a fresh and citrine wine with fruity and floral aroma, that has even a smaller annual production of about 15 000 bottles a year. The small production of these high quality wines have made this region a special treat for the connoisseurs!

There are several vineyards and cellars in Sintra that produce a vast variety of wines of excellent quality

Some of our favourite Sintra vineyards include

• Cooperativa de Colares, the country’s oldest wine co-op
• Casal Santa Maria and Adega Viúva Gomes in Almoçageme
• Quinta San Michel in Janas

All of them organize tours and wine tastings – enquire and set up yours through our office so that you can taste these wonderful wines. We will be happy to suggest hikes to visit the cellars and the vineyards!

For more information on walks that take you to these vineyards, check out the WalkSintra page.

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Sintra is famous for its pastries. The pastries of Piriquita, travesseiros, are famous all over Portugal, and people cue up to buy them to take home by boxes. These long, sugar coded ‘pillows’ are best still warm, and they are freshly made all through the day. The outside is a flaky shell, inside filling is with egg yolk and sugar and almond…. Of course the recipe is a secret, under lock and key, patented and worth a fortune. There are a lot of imitation pastries around, but none as perfect a combination as the original of Piriquita. The main coffee-shop is right in the middle of the Historical Center, and it is closed on Wednesdays – but don’t worry: they have opened the ‘Piriquita 2’ a little bit further up on the street to make sure that you can get yours no matter what the day of the week is when you are in Sintra. But be forewarned – especially during the weekends and all through the summer afternoons, the lines are long (= about a half an hour).

Queijadas de Sintra, Sintra cheese cakes, is another famous pastry of the region. These are usually eaten cold and they last long. Very different from the American cheese cakes, these pastries are small and round, and are made not with cream cheese but with the local unsalted cottage cheese type fresh cheese and cinnamon. Normally you buy the pastries to go, wrapped in a paper tube, 6 in a package. There are several pastry shops that have their own recipe: the original cheese cake bakery, SAPA by the City Hall (already famous for its pastries in the middle of the 1800’s), Casa do Preto in the entrance of Sintra by São Pedro, Pastelaria Gregório in town and also Piriquita. All of these places have their own patented recipes and nice coffee shops to visit and experiment the ‘goodies’.

Fofos de Belas is yet another famous local pastry. The muffin-size sponge-like cake is filled with a cream and covered with fine sugar, every bite melting in your mouth. They are baked in a traditional wood-burning bread oven and also are a tradition of one special bakery – and are fiercely copied.

Also worth mentioning are the Pasteis de Belém, or Pasteis de Nata. Though they are originals of Lisbon, they have been quite successfully ‘copied’ by the Sintra bakeries. These cup-like tarts are filled with an egg and cream custard, often powdered with cinnamon or powdered sugar. Great either warm or cold, they are just the perfect little thing, not over sweet, to go with a quick cup of coffee. They are not attractive but boy are they tasty!

And as if the pastries were not enough, the bread in this region is divine! Traditionally made in a wood-burning stove, people cue up daily for the fresh bread – and it is worth it! Small carcaças, half loaves, full loaves, well cooked, lightly cooked, all white flour or integral, or half-and half, or mixture of wheat and rye, or rye and corn, baked in water or in milk……. I have never seen as many varieties of bread as in Portugal. And Portuguese bread is world-famous. Even the local baker in the Seychelles made bread with a Portuguese recipe! And the bread is baked and bought daily – the bread of the day before is given to the chicken and other farm animals.

So you can see why it is tough for me to ignore the scent of freshly-baked pastries, lingering in the streets. And once you try them, you can believe that they can easily become an addiction!

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