This is the point where most visitors are quietly disappointed, so take the disappointment first. The castle of Óbidos is a hotel. It has been one since 1951, when the state opened it as the first pousada installed in a historic monument in Portugal, and the castle’s own information site states plainly that it is not open for public touring. There is no ticket, no route, no armoury and no keep to climb.
What is free and open, and what most people miss, is set out on the same site: the Cerca do Castelo — the walled outer enclosure below the keep — plus the garden, the terrace and the belvedere. Access to those is free except when an event has the enclosure, which in practice means the Mercado Medieval for eleven days in July and the Christmas village in December. The Cerca is where the medieval market pitches its tournament field, and standing in it empty in February tells you more about the scale of the place than the market does.
The hill was Roman, then Moorish; Afonso Henriques took it in 1148. King Dinis rebuilt the castle after 1282, when he gave Óbidos to his queen, Isabel of Aragon, as a wedding gift — the town then stayed in the personal estate of the queens of Portugal, the Casa das Rainhas, until 1834. The keep is Dinis’s, heavily restored in the 20th century after earthquake damage. The castle was declared a National Monument in 1910.
If you want inside. The pousada’s restaurant serves 13:00–15:00 and 19:30–22:30 and there is a bar; reserving a table is the ordinary way for a non-guest to get through the door and see the vaulted interior. Book ahead — it is a small house and the dining room is not a walk-in. Otherwise, walk up through the Cerca, look at the keep from below, and put your money into the wall walk, which is free and better.
