Affiliate disclosure

Where the links are

Every tour card, every booking widget and every “check availability” button. They carry rel="nofollow noopener" and open in a new tab. Nothing else here is paid for, sponsored or exchanged: no operator has paid to appear, none has been shown a page before it went up, and no operator company is named anywhere on this site in any language.

What the commission does not buy, and how to check

A commission is a percentage, so in principle a dearer listing earns more. Three things on this site cut against that, and all three take a minute to check.

First, the cheapest thing in the catalogue is the one this site recommends most often. Monserrate’s own ticket is twelve euros, it covers the palace and the park, and it is the same price at the window as on the platform — so there is nothing clever to be gained either way, and tickets says so in its first paragraph. A site chasing commission would be steering you towards a day trip.

Second, getting there tells you about the train from Lisbon and the bus from Sintra station, which is the way to reach this palace without booking anything at all. That page is linked from every other page on the site rather than buried.

Third, the pages that criticise a listing criticise it at length. The busiest listing that names Monserrate gets a page whose central section is about the monument entrance fees its own exclusions put on top. Another gets a page whose first sentence says nobody has written a word about it and you would be booking it blind. Those are the two pages a commission-first site would not write.

What is not affected

Which listings appear. All nineteen in the catalogue are on all tours, including the three that rest on exactly one rating, the one with no written review at all, and seven big Sintra days that do not come to Monserrate and are carried precisely because they do not. A listing is not dropped for being cheap, thinly rated or awkward to explain.

And what the pages say. The ratings, the rating counts and the two lists from each listing’s own page are reproduced as they stand. How that is done is on editorial policy.

What the palace gets

Nothing from me, and no relationship either way. The Park and Palace of Monserrate is run by Parques de Sintra, which sells its own tickets and has never been asked for a comment on anything written here. The Cultural Landscape of Sintra has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1995 and this park is within it; that is a fact about the landscape and not an endorsement of this website.

Questions about any of it: contact.