Lisbon Tickets: Every Official Price and What to Book

Two tickets in Lisbon can actually run out. Belém Tower has sold timed slots since it reopened on 27 May 2026 after thirteen months of works, the interior is a single spiral stair with one-way traffic, and the number of slots is small; in summer the afternoons go days ahead. Pena Palace in Sintra sells a dated and timed slot for the palace interior and states that a visitor who arrives after the slot is refused with no change and no refund — and the walk from the park gate to the palace door is about thirty minutes uphill, which is where most late arrivals are made. Book those two first, on the official shops or through a tour that carries the ticket.

Third is the Jerónimos cloister, which does not sell out but does queue: the ticket office closes at 16:30 and last entry is 17:00, and a pre-bought €18 ticket at the same price as the desk is simply a shorter line. Fourth is the Oceanário, where the price is the hour: €29 before 11:30, €27 midday, €25 from 16:00. Everything else on this page walks up.

Lisbon's sights answer to four different owners, and the shop follows the owner. Museus e Monumentos de Portugal, the state body, runs Jerónimos, Belém Tower, the Coach Museum, the Pantheon, Ajuda and the Tile Museum, and sells all of them through one ticket site, mmp.bymeoblueticket.pt, with one set of rules: adults full price, 65+ and 13–24 half, under-12s free, a family of at least one adult and a minor half. EGEAC, the city's cultural company, runs the castle and the Monument to the Discoveries, each with its own site and its own concessions. Turismo de Lisboa sells the Rua Augusta arch, Pilar 7, the Royal Treasure Museum and the Lisboa Card through shop.visitlisboa.com. The Sé, the Carmo, São Vicente, MAAT, the Oceanário and Cristo Rei are their own shops. Parques de Sintra is a fifth owner, out of town, with the only zero-tolerance slot in this guide.

The practical consequence: an MMP account buys four Belém and Alfama tickets in one basket, but the castle and the Discoveries monument need two more, and nothing on the state site touches Sintra. The Lisboa Card is the one product that crosses all the owners, which is most of its case.

Three things are sold to first visitors as passes. The Lisboa Card, €31, €51 or €62 for 24, 48 or 72 hours, covers transport including the Sintra train and free entry to the state monuments, the castle and about fifty other sites, with Belém Tower and the cloister still needing a slot; it is the only pass that replaces tickets. The navegante 24-hour Carris and Metro pass at €7.25 (€11.40 with CP) is transport only, and does not include the funiculars or Santa Justa even when they run.

The hop-on hop-off ticket at €47 for 72 hours on the platform is a sightseeing bus with a boat, not transport and not entry. The getting-around page prices the transport passes against zapping; the card page does the entry maths.

The age rules are where the real discounts are. At every state monument under-12s are free and 13 to 24 and over-65s pay half — so a Belém Tower ticket is €7.50 for a 20-year-old and nothing for a child. The castle is €8.50 from 13 to 25 and €14 over 65; the Discoveries monument €5 and €8.50; the Sé €5 for children 7 to 12; Cristo Rei €3 from 8 to 12. MAAT drops to €8 on Thursday and Friday evenings from 19:00 to 21:00 for everyone. The Oceanário's cheapest adult tier is simply the last one, €25 from 16:00.

The free Sunday is the trap. Until 31 July 2024 the state museums were free on Sunday and holiday mornings for everyone. Since 1 August 2024 they are free on Sundays, holidays and 52 days a year for Portuguese citizens and residents only, who register a citizen card and tax number at the desk; a visitor with a foreign passport pays on Sunday what they pay on Saturday. The exceptions belong to other owners: the Monument to the Discoveries is free for Lisbon residents on Sunday and holiday mornings, São Vicente for residents on the first Sunday, MAAT for residents in Portugal on the first Sunday from 10:00 to 13:00, and the Museu da Água's aqueduct walk is free for everyone on the first Sunday of the month. The Gulbenkian's own listing says Sundays from 14:00 are free, with no residency clause, but we could not open the page to confirm.

The Jerónimos church, through its own door on Praça do Império, Tuesday to Saturday 10:30 to 17:00 and Sundays from 14:00 — the cloister ticket is for the cloister. Praça do Comércio and the river steps. The three Alfama miradouros.

Time Out Market, LX Factory and Pink Street. The Belém riverfront from the tower to MAAT, whose roof is a free walk even when the galleries are ticketed. The Gulbenkian garden.

The Carmo ruins seen from Largo do Carmo, and the Santa Justa platform reached on foot from the same square, which is the only way onto it while the lift is closed. The things-to-do list marks the free ten with their hours.

Four transport landmarks: the Glória, Bica and Lavra funiculars and the Santa Justa lift, closed since the Glória derailment on 3 September 2025, with replacement buses 51E, 22B and 19B and no reopening date on carris.pt as of 29 August 2026. The National Tile Museum, closed since 1 November 2025 for building works, still listed as shut in the ministry's April 2026 figures, shop moved to Palácio Foz. Pilar 7's lift, under repair, the platform reached by 372 stairs at €3 instead of €3.70.

The Pantheon's official page still carried a June 2025 works notice and the monument closes for state ceremonies at short notice. Belém Tower's two official pages disagree on its opening hour, 9:00 in English and 9:30 in Portuguese. And the Gulbenkian's Founder's Collection galleries were reported closed for renovation with a July 2026 reopening — reported by third parties, not confirmed by the foundation, whose site refused our fetch.

The Monday closures page has the weekly pattern; this list is the one-off pattern.

In Lisbon, mostly neither. The state monuments charge the same online and at the desk with no booking fee; the castle, the Sé, the Pantheon and the Coach Museum are the same price on the platform as at the door, so the online ticket is buying a calendar, not a discount — and the plain entry tickets are non-refundable on the platform as at the desk. The exceptions run both ways.

Online is cheaper at the Oceanário, by 5 per cent with the code its own site prints, and on the Sintra 434 bus, where the 24-hour ticket is €10.96 online against €13.50 on board according to sintra434.com. Online is dearer where an audio guide is bundled in: the castle e-ticket with audio at €27 against €17 at the gate, the Coach Museum at €20 against €15. The castle tickets page weighs whether the separate entrance is worth the ten euros; on an August morning at 11:00 it usually is, on a January afternoon it is not.

Every seller tells you the slot is fixed, and then stops. We read the official pages of the state monuments, Parques de Sintra, the castle and the Oceanário on 29 August 2026 and this is what each will actually do. Where a venue publishes nothing, the row says so — and in Lisbon most of them publish nothing, which is itself the useful fact.

Late for the slot: one venue publishes a grace period, one publishes a refusal

Regaleira states an hour. Pena states zero. The state monuments state nothing at all, and Belém Tower's slot system has existed only since 27 May 2026, so there is no track record to quote; the honest advice is to take the first slot of the day, when a late arrival still has the whole day of later slots behind it to negotiate with.

The Oceanário's tiers are prices rather than slots — arrive after the tier you paid for and the door has no reason to stop you; arrive before it and it does.

The one recovery rule that helps

Parques de Sintra lets an online Pena ticket be rescheduled within a year, which turns a rained-off Sintra day into a postponed one instead of a lost €45. Nothing in the city offers the same. A tour that carries the Pena ticket, such as the half-day Sintra tour with Pena entry, moves the risk to the operator: its cancellation rule is the platform's 24-hour one, and being late for the palace becomes the guide's problem, which is a reasonable thing to pay for on a first visit.