Good stay, but with a couple issues… I’ll start with the positives first. Overall, this place is in such a perfect location! The location itself in Sintra truly can’t be beat. You are literally 60 seconds walk to the National Palace and all the restaurants and shops in the main Sintra city center square… and yet you’re just tucked away on a quiet side street which is very nice to come back to relax/sleep. Also, the host (Izumi) is very friendly, super helpful and is quick to communicate. She offered to help us with booking transportation to the Lisbon airport, and was very nice and helpful overall.
Our main complaints or negatives that we experienced had to do with both myself, my husband and our 7 month old baby getting spider bites from sleeping in the lower bedroom. It happened almost each night, we woke up with a few new bite marks each day… but our baby got it the worst with 8 bite marks all over her body, and my husband had almost just as many. I think the lower level bedroom needs a thorough cleaning to get rid of this issue. Thankfully my husbands parents and our other daughter didn’t get any bites, but they were sleeping in the upper bedroom, so it didn’t appear to be an issue there.
The other problem we experienced was the entry door and barely being able to enter/exit, especially with our luggage… there was always a car (a neighbors we were told) parked in front of the front door, but they parked SO close that it was VERY difficult to get into the door… and while there is a side entrance that you could take a flight of stairs down and then enter the lower unit that way, we couldn’t do that either during our stay because there is scaffolding set up on the building next door which is under construction that blocks most of the staircase (you can walk down, but you cannot squeeze luggage down without having major difficulties). Hopefully the neighbor will stop parking so close in the future, and once the scaffolding is gone (maybe a few months or a year not sure?) then the side entrance will also be easier to access).
Also to note, we were warned by Izumi that this Airbnb was not child friendly, but while we appreciated this heads-up, we found it was totally fine. In our experience, pretty much no Airbnb is “childproof” and of course neither are hotels, so we expect that to be the case.
Overall, it’s a great place… but beware of the spiders and the difficulties at the entryways.