Lisbon

A district is a territorial division of Portugal — there are eighteen on the mainland — and Lisbon is both the name of one of them and the name of the city at its southern edge. What it is not is a tier of elected regional government. The civil-governor offices that once headed the districts were discontinued in 2011, and a referendum in 1998 rejected the creation of administrative regions on the mainland altogether. Districts survive as territorial and electoral units. Only the Azores and Madeira are autonomous regions with governments of their own, and neither is anywhere near here.

A whole day, comfortably, and the honest answer on the palaces is two. The hills hold the Pena Palace, the Castelo dos Mouros along the ridge, the Quinta da Regaleira with its famous inverted well, the National Palace in the town and the Monserrate estate further out, and visitors routinely try to do four of them. The sites are spread across steep wooded ground, the connections between them take longer than the map suggests, and the queues in season are real. Two properly seen is a far better day than four glimpsed, and the town itself deserves an hour that most itineraries never give it.

You can, and you should know what you are getting into first. This is the open Atlantic rather than the Mediterranean, and the water off this coast stays noticeably colder through the year than most visitors expect — it is at its most tolerable in late summer and early autumn. The sheltered beaches along the Cascais line are the easy ones, reachable by train from the city and busy in season. The west-facing coast around Guincho and Ericeira is a different proposition: bigger surf, strong currents and wind, excellent for surfing and often unsuitable for a casual swim. Read the flags, and take them seriously.

It is the westernmost point of mainland Europe, which is the precise version of the claim and the one worth using. Islands well out in the Atlantic reach further west — Portugal’s own Azores among them, and Iceland further north — so the headland is the western end of the continental landmass rather than of everything Europeans call Europe. What is there is a lighthouse, a stone marker with a line from the poet Camões, cliffs dropping to the sea and a great deal of wind. It takes half an hour to see and is usually paired with Sintra or Cascais rather than visited alone.

Give Sintra the first one, whole and unhurried — it is the day almost nobody regrets, and the half-day version bolted onto a city itinerary consistently disappoints. The second day is the real choice. Cabo da Roca and Cascais together make a comfortable pairing and suit anyone who wants sea air and a harbour town after the palaces. The northern end at Mafra and Ericeira is quieter and more workaday, and it is the better answer if surf or baroque excess appeal more than a resort promenade. Two days beyond the capital is the sensible ceiling; a third is better spent moving on to Porto or the Alentejo than adding another return trip out of the city.

Several that appear on Lisbon day-trip lists. Everything across the Tagus is the district of Setúbal, including the Cristo Rei statue that looks so close from the city, Sesimbra and the Arrábida hills. Óbidos with its walls, the surf at Nazaré and the sanctuary at Fátima are all in the district of Leiria to the north. Évora and its Roman temple are in the Alentejo, inland. Porto is at the far northern end of the country and the Algarve at the far southern one, and Madeira and the Azores are autonomous island regions out in the Atlantic reached by air.