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Praia Grande (Sintra) surf forecast
Kiwi reads Praia Grande, on the Sintra coast at Colares, four times a day and tells you the hour worth paddling out for. Free, hour by hour, in plain words.
When to paddle out at Praia Grande
Today and tomorrow hour by hour from 05:00 to 21:00, then every 3 hours for two more days, rated 1 to 5 stars. Green-outlined rows are each day's best window.
10:00–12:00 · glassy
Today 31 Oct
Marginal 08-12: wrong tide, overhead, cross-offshore NE.
Best window: 08:00–12:00
Every hour, 05–21
Tide and daylight
- High
- 05:45 3.5 m
- Low
- 12:11 1.3 m
- High
- 18:26 3.1 m
- Sunrise
- 07:02
- Sunset
- 17:38
Tomorrow 1 Nov
Marginal 10-14: big for this spot, well overhead, glassy.
Best window: 10:00–14:00
Every hour, 05–21
Tide and daylight
- Low
- 00:27 1.6 m
- High
- 06:54 3.3 m
- Low
- 13:31 1.5 m
- High
- 19:48 3.0 m
- Sunrise
- 07:04
- Sunset
- 17:38
Monday 2 Nov
Go 10-12, clean overhead, glassy.
Kiwi's best shot: 10:00–12:00
Every 3 hours
Tide and daylight
- Low
- 01:51 1.7 m
- High
- 08:16 3.2 m
- Low
- 14:59 1.5 m
- High
- 21:17 3.0 m
- Sunrise
- 07:05
- Sunset
- 17:37
Tuesday 3 Nov
Go 09-13, clean chest-shoulder, glassy.
Best window: 09:00–13:00
Every 3 hours
Tide and daylight
- Low
- 03:18 1.7 m
- High
- 09:39 3.3 m
- Low
- 16:14 1.5 m
- High
- 22:28 3.1 m
- Sunrise
- 07:06
- Sunset
- 17:36
Forecast point: Praia Grande (38.816° N, 9.476° W). Waves = estimated breaking height at the beach. Data: Open-Meteo wave and weather models (CC BY 4.0), corrected on buoys. Generated using E.U. Copernicus Marine Service Information (DOI 10.48670/moi-00043). Surf at your own risk.
Read the wind first. Praia Grande faces west-northwest, so an east wind grooms it and the summer north wind blows straight across it, hardest in the afternoon. Check the wind column before the wave column.
Praia Grande and its neighbours
Praia Grande sits in Colares, inside the Sintra-Cascais Natural Park: a long sandy beach with a cliff at each end, Praia Pequena tucked in just north and Adraga just south. It is one of the busiest beaches on the Sintra coast, and surfers and bodyboarders are a big part of the reason.
Praia da Adraga
ExperiencedRocksThe next cove south, under high cliffs. Sand with rocks, best known for its lefts, especially at the south end. A big rock formation sits in the middle of the bay and guides warn of currents and rips, so it suits experienced surfers.
Praia Grande
Kiwi forecasts itAll levels on small daysBodyboardThe main event: a long, exposed beach break over sand with peaks that move with the sandbanks. Guides describe a left at the south side, an A-frame in the middle and, at the north end below the ocean pool, the "pool right", which one guide calls powerful, at its best on a north-west swell at low tide. Small days suit beginners; bigger days are for intermediates and up.
At the south end, the cliff holds dinosaur footprints more than 100 million years old, pressed into a limestone layer that now stands almost upright. The council closed the staircase up to them in November 2018, and on 30 November a block of rock fell onto the closed stairs.
Every year the beach hosts the Sintra Bodyboard Pro Fest, a stop on the bodyboarding world tour. The 2026 edition, in early September, was its 30th.
Praia Pequena
QuieterNo lifeguardsThe small bay just north, past the hotel and its pool. It is more sheltered from the north wind and often quieter, with lefts and rights over sand and rock; one guide says mid tide is usually best. You reach it by a path down the cliff, there are no lifeguards, and the maritime police mark its cliffs as unstable. Locals like it, so surf it politely.
Praia das Maçãs
Sintra tramSummer crowdsA narrow bay with rocks at both edges and sand in the middle, so stay on the sand. It works best with a smaller swell and little wind, and fills up in summer. The old Sintra tram ends here.
Magoito
Big NW swellFewer peopleAbout 5 km north. Several peaks, plus a long right on the north side that wakes up with a bigger north-west swell. One guide finds it punchier and less crowded than Praia Grande.
What Praia Grande needs to fire
These are the exact rules behind Kiwi's rating for this spot. Every hour of the forecast is scored on all four, then turned into a rating of 1 to 5 stars.
Swell
West to north-west, 9 s or longer
The beach faces west-northwest (the line on the dial), so swell from 250° to 320° walks straight in. That open window is why guides call it one of the most consistent breaks near Lisbon.
Wind
Offshore from the east
Wind from about 65° to 135° blows offshore and holds the faces up. Under 6 km/h Kiwi calls it glassy. Light shades on the dial are cross-offshore: still fine. A north wind blows across the beach and roughs it up.
Tide
Low to mid
Kiwi's rating prefers low to mid tide. Guides differ here: some say every tide works, others warn that high tide turns into a heavy shorebreak on the sand. The tide swings 2 to 4 metres between low and high.
Size
Best at 0.9 to 2.2 metres
Waves start to work from about half a metre. Above 2.2 metres it gets heavy and big winter swells close out, and over 3 metres Kiwi says stay out.
Kiwi's shortcut: a west to north-west swell, an east wind and low to mid tide. When those three line up, the green-outlined rows show up in the table above.
The best months to surf Praia Grande
We replayed Kiwi's rating on every day from January 2025 to October 2026 and counted how often Praia Grande's best window reached 4 or 5 stars.
Sep · Oct · NovThe sweet spot
September and October are Praia Grande's most reliable months (December matched October, but on one year of data): the best window reached 4 or 5 stars on 18% and 19% of days, and about 41% of days had a session worth 3 stars or more. November turns big (3.7 m at the typical best window) and only 7% of days made 4+.
Dec · Jan · FebBig, usually too big
Winter is when this beach gets huge: the typical size at the day's best window was 4.4 m, so only 15% of winter days had a session worth 3 stars or more. The good days still come: December, with one year of data, reached 4+ stars on 19% of days.
Mar · Apr · MaySettling down
The swell eases through spring, from about 3.4 m in March to 2.1 m in May at the best window. 10% of days reached 4+ stars and 31% had 3 or more, with April the pick (15% at 4+).
Jun · Jul · AugWaves, but mind the wind
Summer still has surf: 39% of days had a session worth 3 stars or more. The catch is the north wind: the best window had clean wind (offshore, cross-offshore or glassy) on only 24% of summer days. Go early: the best window started before 11:00 on 80% of them.
Before you go
Rips and lifeguards
The maritime police's hazard map of this beach marks three rip currents along the sand, a deep hole near the pool end and strong currents beside the south cliff. Look for a darker channel with fewer breaking waves before you paddle out.
The 2026 bathing season, with lifeguards from 09:00 to 19:00, ran from 30 May to 13 September. In 2025 the council also paid for weekend lifeguards in May and from late September to mid-October. Emergencies: 112.
The yellow-warning rule
This coast falls under the Cascais port captaincy, and its rules are stricter than most surfers expect. Surfing, bodyboarding and SUP are banned while IPMA has a yellow (or higher) sea warning out, and are only allowed from sunrise to one hour before sunset. Licensed athletes training with a coach are exempt.
In the bathing season, at lifeguarded beaches, the rules allow surfing between 150 and 300 m from the shoreline or in the corridors marked for it.
Cliffs
The environment agency (APA) rates the cliff risk here as high. The council closed the staircase up the south cliff in November 2018, a rock block then fell onto it, and signs on the beach still say the path is closed. Keep away from the foot of the cliffs, here and at Praia Pequena.
Getting there without a car
- Sintra line train from Lisbon Rossio to Portela de Sintra, the stop before Sintra.
- Then bus 1254 towards Magoito: about 25 min to Praia Grande, 26 trips a weekday and 13 a day at weekends (November 2026).
- Or bus 1250, which ends at the beach: about 50 min, via Almoçageme.
- The historic Sintra tram (about 45 min) ends at Praia das Maçãs, a little further north. It came back on 23 May 2026 after maintenance work; check its timetable.
Driving and parking
40 minutes to an hour from Lisbon by car, traffic allowing.
Since 1 October 2026 parking at Praia Grande is paid all year, 08:00 to 20:00. From October to April it costs €0.10 per 15 minutes, up to €0.50 an hour, and the first 15 minutes are free; from May to September it runs from €0.45 per 15 minutes to €4 for four hours. In summer 2026 the car park opposite the Arribas hotel and the dirt lots were free.
Surf schools
A few schools that teach on this beach, in no order: Praia Grande Surf School, Soul Spot Surf School, Solfun Surf School.
Crowds
Busy at weekends and in summer, and you share the line-up with strong locals, so mind the etiquette. Praia Pequena, the bay to the north, is often quieter but is the locals' favourite too.
Water and wetsuit
About 14 to 15 °C in late winter and about 18 °C in early autumn. The summer north wind pulls cold water up along this coast, so August can feel fresher than you expect.
Typical advice: a 4/3 mm full suit in winter, with boots on the coldest days, and a 3/2 from late spring to early autumn.
Webcams
KiwiSurf has no camera of its own yet. Surftotal runs a live HD cam here, and MEO Beachcam has Praia Grande Norte, Praia Grande Sul and Praia Pequena.
Where the numbers come from
The method
Kiwi starts from all four of Open-Meteo's wave models at Praia Grande (ECMWF WAM, Météo-France, NOAA GFS-Wave and Open-Meteo's own best-match blend; ECMWF's nearest grid cell is land, so its numbers come from a sea cell a little further out, at 38.75° N, 9.75° W) and corrects them with a model trained on past forecasts against Instituto Hidrográfico buoys, before anything else happens.
Then each hour at Praia Grande is scored on the four rules above (swell, wind, tide, size) and calibrated so that 4 stars at Praia Grande mean the same as 4 stars at Carcavelos.
What we can prove
Measured on 30 days the model never trained on (29 September to 28 October 2026) at the offshore buoys. Not every week is better: in the last 7 days of that test, with big October swells, waves were 6% worse.
There is no buoy at Praia Grande, so the size at the beach is our model's estimate, not a measurement. See the full accuracy test.
Praia Grande surf questions
What is the surf like at Praia Grande today?
Kiwi's 07:56 run gives Praia Grande 2/5 stars today: Marginal 08-12: wrong tide, overhead, cross-offshore NE. Waves 2.0–2.7 m, 12 s swell from the WNW, wind cross-offshore NE 9 km/h, tide high falling. The table above has today and tomorrow hour by hour from 05:00 to 21:00 and the two days after every 3 hours.
Is Praia Grande in Sintra good for surfing?
Yes. It is an exposed beach break over sand that picks up a lot of west and north-west swell, which is why guides rank it among the most consistent breaks near Lisbon. In Kiwi's replay of 2025 and 2026, September and October were the most reliable months, with 4 or 5 stars on 18% and 19% of days (December matched October on one year of data).
Is Praia Grande good for beginners?
On small days, yes, and summer is the gentlest season, when the surf schools work the beach. On bigger days it gets powerful and fast, and the pool right and the middle peak are for intermediates and up. Watch for rips along the beach and be careful in the shorebreak at high tide.
When is the best time of year to surf Praia Grande?
September and October, in Kiwi's replay: 4+ stars on 18% and 19% of days, with December level with October on one year of data. Winter is usually too big, spring settles down, and summer has waves but a lot of north wind, so go early: the best summer window started before 11:00 on 80% of days.
What wind and tide work best at Praia Grande?
An east wind (about 65° to 135°) blows offshore here, and under 6 km/h it is glassy. Guides differ on the tide: some say every tide works, others warn that high tide turns into a heavy shorebreak, and Kiwi's rating prefers low to mid tide.
Is Praia Grande windy?
Often, in summer. North and north-west winds dominate in the summer months and the north wind is strongest in the afternoon, which blows across this beach. That is why Kiwi's best summer windows started before 11:00 on 80% of days. The table above shows wind speed, gusts and direction for every hour.
Is there a webcam at Praia Grande?
Not from KiwiSurf yet. Surftotal has a live HD cam, and MEO Beachcam has Praia Grande Norte, Praia Grande Sul and Praia Pequena. A cam shows you now; Kiwi tells you which hour to go.
How do I get to Praia Grande without a car?
Where can I park at Praia Grande?
On the access roads and the seafront, paid all year since 1 October 2026, from 08:00 to 20:00: €0.10 per 15 minutes from October to April (the first 15 minutes free) and up to €4 for four hours from May to September. In summer 2026 the car park opposite the Arribas hotel was free.
What is the water temperature at Praia Grande?
About 14 to 15 °C in late winter and about 18 °C in early autumn. In summer the north wind can pull cold water up along the coast. Typical advice: a 4/3 mm wetsuit in winter, with boots on the coldest days, and a 3/2 in summer.
Can I surf at Praia Grande with a yellow sea warning?
No. Under the Cascais port captaincy's rules, which cover the Sintra coast, surfing and bodyboarding are banned while IPMA has a yellow or higher sea-state warning out (licensed athletes with a coach excepted), and are only allowed from sunrise to one hour before sunset.
Is there a pool at Praia Grande?
Yes. The Arribas Sintra Hotel's 100 m saltwater pool, filled from the sea, sits at the north end of the beach and is open to non-guests in season. From June to October 2026 a full day cost €15 to €30, depending on the month and the day.
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