Cascais, Portugal

Cascais and its spectacular coastline are a must-see destination for any visitor to Portugal. Flanked on two sides by the Atlantic Ocean, the region is located just 25 km from Lisbon and its international airport, stretching west in a rectangle from Carcavelos to Guincho Beach. Nearby stands the imposing Cabo da Roca, mainland Europe’s most westerly point.

Watch the video: "Cascais Promotional Video for IMPACTOUR" (2 min, 01 sec)

With its mild year-round climate, the Portuguese Riviera (as the region is known) offers a surprising variety of landscapes and attractions, combining a wide range of possibilities in one very unique destination. From pure leisure to business, golf, sun, sea, and water sports, it simply has it all and offers a new definition of the concepts of eco- and activity-based tourism.

Cultural Tourism

Cascais cultural sites comprise a set of museum units and interpretive centers, whose different themes go beyond the representation of the territory and the historical municipal heritage through the presentation of collections ranging from the history of art and decorative arts to natural history, terrestrial and underwater archaeology, marine ethnology, Portuguese music, to military history and science and technology.

The “Condes de Castro Guimarães” Museum, one of the landmarks of Cascais, is housed in the Palace of the Counts of Castro Guimarães, a beautiful mock-Gothic building in an inlet by the sea. Inaugurated in 1931 it is the oldest museum of Cascais and a remarkable piece of romantic architecture.

Also related to the sea, the Santa Marta Lighthouse museum gathers representative pieces that illustrate its activity whilst it was a lighthouse, featuring a series of optical devices from the 19th and 20th centuries as well as an audiovisual center where a multilingual documentary about the lighthouses of Portugal is exhibited.

Watch the video: "Cascais, the Charm of the Atlantic Coast (2 min, 00 sec)

At a national and international contemporary art level Cascais hosts the “Casa das Histórias de Paula Rego” Museum (Paula Rego House of Stories) that has as its mission the knowledge and enjoyment of the works of Paula Rego and her artistic connections.

This museum the artist hopes to be a space filled with "fun, unpretentious, alive, full of joy and lots of mischiefs", seeks to strengthen not only the fabric of Portuguese museums for contemporary art but also to fit into the international art circuit and its audiences by providing a cultural service of excellence, through the rotating exhibit of the collection, a dynamic educational service and diverse parallel programming.

Links

• https://www.cascais.pt/
• https://www.visitcascais.com/en
• https://www.visitcascais.com/en/resource/casa-das-historias-paula-rego
• https://www.visitcascais.com/en/resource/museu-condes-de-castro-guimaraes
• https://cultura.cascais.pt/

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Key information
Area: 97,4 km2, Coastal Area   
Number of inhabitants:  214.134 (2021)
GPS Coordinates
Latitude: 38.6971° N
Longitude: 9.4223° W