Lisbon on Monday: What Is Closed, What Is Open, Sight by Sight

The state museums and monuments — the ones run by Museus e Monumentos de Portugal, MMP — take Monday off as a group: Jerónimos, Belém Tower, the Coach Museum, the Panteão, the Tile Museum. That is the whole of the Monday problem, and it happens to be most of Belém. The city-run and private venues do the opposite.

EGEAC, the municipal company, keeps the castle and the Padrão open every day. The Oceanário and the Zoo open every day of the year. The two foundations, MAAT and the Gulbenkian, close on Tuesday.

The two churches with a ticket, the Sé and the Carmo, close on Sunday for services and open on Monday. The Ajuda palace is the odd one, closed on Wednesday, while its treasure museum next door — run by Turismo de Lisboa — opens daily.

• Closed Monday: Jerónimos cloister and church, Belém Tower, Coach Museum, Panteão, Museu da Água, Pavilhão do Conhecimento (its hours list Tuesday to Sunday), Tile Museum (closed for works)
• Closed Tuesday: MAAT, Gulbenkian
• Closed Wednesday: Ajuda palace (the Tesouro Real stays open)
• Closed Sunday: the Sé, the Carmo Convent; the Jerónimos church until 14:00
• Open every day: castle, Oceanário, Padrão, São Vicente, Cristo Rei, Arco da Rua Augusta, Pilar 7 (stairs only), Tesouro Real, Zoo, Time Out Market, Pastéis de Belém

Heights and views. The castle from 09:00, with the ramparts open by daylight until 21:00 in summer; the Arco da Rua Augusta lift and 74 steps from 10:00; Cristo Rei's lift across the river from 10:00; the Padrão's rooftop in Belém; Pilar 7 by 372 stairs while its lift is under repair. Every miradouro, being a square, is open. Museums. MAAT and the Gulbenkian, the two that close on Tuesday instead; the Tesouro Real at Ajuda, daily; the Ajuda palace itself, closed on Wednesday not Monday; the Carmo's archaeological museum in its roofless nave. Churches. The Sé with its ticketed treasury and choir, São Vicente de Fora's cloisters and rooftop, the Estrela basilica, whose hours no official page states. The rest. The Oceanário and the Zoo, every day of the year; Time Out Market from 10:00; Pastéis de Belém from 08:00; the Cais do Sodré ferry to Cacilhas; tram 28, which has no day off.

09:00 — the castle. Be at the gate when it opens; the e-ticket with audio guide is a plain entry, €17 at the door, under-12s free. Ramparts, the eastern viewpoint, the museum, and the peacocks, before the coaches. 10:30 — down through Alfama to the Sé. Twenty minutes on foot; the cathedral opens at 10:00 (09:30 from May to October), €7 for the treasury, high choir and bell-tower balcony, and it is closed on Sunday, so Monday is its day. 11:30 — Baixa to Chiado. Rua Augusta, the arch (€5, lift plus 74 steps) if the sky is clear, then the Baixa-Chiado escalators up to the Carmo Convent, open Monday to Saturday from 10:00, €7 — the roofless nave the 1755 earthquake left. 13:00 — lunch in Chiado or the market. Time Out Market at Cais do Sodré is ten minutes downhill and open from 10:00.

14:30 — the Gulbenkian or MAAT. Both close on Tuesday, so both are Monday museums; the Gulbenkian is the blue line to São Sebastião, MAAT the 15E to Belém. Pick by weather: MAAT's roof is an outdoor walk. 16:00 — the Oceanário. Red line to Oriente; the 16:00–18:30 tier is €25 against €29 in the morning, the entrance ticket is a plain entry, last entry 19:00. 19:30 — back to the castle side for the evening. From March to October the castle is open until 21:00 with last admission at 20:30; a second look from the ramparts at dusk costs nothing extra if you kept the day ticket, and the fado show inside the medieval walls is a few streets below.

Sunday closes the two ticketed churches. The Sé's page says closed on Sundays and holy days; the Carmo Convent's says closed on Sundays, plus 25 December, 1 January and 1 May. The Jerónimos church — the free half of the monastery — opens on Sunday only from 14:00 to 17:00 because of morning mass, while the cloister keeps its ordinary 09:30–17:30.

Everything else opens. Two Sunday rules are worth knowing even though they do not close anything: the Padrão is free for Lisbon residents on Sunday until 14:00, and the Museu da Água is free for everyone on the first Sunday of the month — the only genuinely free Sunday left in the city, since the state monuments ended free Sundays for non-residents on 1 August 2024.

• Closed Sunday: the Sé, the Carmo Convent
• Sunday afternoon only: the Jerónimos church, 14:00–17:00
• Free on the first Sunday: Museu da Água (everyone); MAAT 10:00–13:00 and São Vicente (residents in Portugal only)
• No free Sunday for tourists at any MMP monument since 1 August 2024

09:30 — Jerónimos cloister at opening, €18, before the church opens to visitors at 14:00; the entrance ticket has no slot. 11:00 — Belém Tower on a timed slot booked ahead, €15, four floors of stairs. 12:30 — Pastéis de Belém, open from 08:00. 13:30 — the Padrão rooftop, €10, or MAAT next door. 14:00 — back into the Jerónimos church, free, when it opens. 16:00 — the Coach Museum, €15, to 18:00. On Sunday the flat Belém strip does everything Monday cannot, and the castle and the Sé keep for Monday — which is the whole reason to plan the two days as a pair.

The table below compares the holiday dates that close everything at once; Each sight's own closure dates, read from its hours page on 29 August 2026. The state monuments share a list; the rest differ in small ways that matter on the day.

The date that surprises people is 13 June, the feast of Santo António, Lisbon's municipal holiday: every state monument closes, the castle and the Padrão stay open, and the night before, 12 June, is the sardine festival that fills Alfama. The Panteão also closes for state ceremonies without much warning — its page carried a stale June 2025 works notice on the day we read it, and it has closed for funerals of state in January — so on the day, its own page is the check.

Parques de Sintra's pages for Pena, the Moorish Castle, Monserrate and the Sintra palace, as read for this site's facts pack, state prices, the Pena slot's zero tolerance and the 30-minute walk to the palace door; none of them states a weekly closing day, and Quinta da Regaleira's page, which changed its hours on 10 August 2026, likewise names none. So the honest answer to "is Sintra closed on Monday" is that no Monday closure is stated on any Sintra ticket page we read, and the Sintra day trip page carries the hours as they stand. The trap in Sintra is not the day but the slot.

Back in the city, Tuesday is the day the two foundations close — MAAT and the Gulbenkian — which makes Tuesday the day to be in Belém's state monuments, freshly reopened after Monday and busy for it. Wednesday closes the Ajuda palace, and only the palace: the Tesouro Real beside it, with the crown jewels, opens every day. The Sé's hours also change by day of the week from May to October — 09:30–19:00 on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, 10:00–18:00 on Wednesday and Saturday — which is the one timetable in the city that needs the weekday, not the season.

Time Out Market opens at 10:00 seven days a week and closes at midnight from Sunday to Wednesday, 02:00 from Thursday to Saturday. The Feira da Ladra flea market by the Panteão runs on Tuesday and Saturday, not Monday, and the Panteão is closed on Monday anyway, so the Campo de Santa Clara is an empty square that day. LX Factory's own site publishes no hours for the complex or its Sunday market, so nothing is printed for it.

The MMP ticket shop online sells for any open day; the castle's ticket office opens with the gate at 09:00. The Ask Me Lisboa office on Praça do Comércio, where a Lisboa Card is collected, opens daily 10:00–19:00, and the card's included transport starts the day of first use — so a card collected on Monday and started on Tuesday loses nothing to the Monday closures.