Used to be our home town, so we're biased. Good shops and facilities. Great base for outings (Isle of Wight, New Forest, Salisbury, Bournemouth and Dorset). Good embarkation facilities at the port.

We have done a tour to the top of the rock before and enjoyed it, but be careful when near the apes (don't have food or anything that looks like food visible). Parts near sea level can be explored using local buses. It's quite a long walk from the port to the town centre, but walking can still be a better option than shuttle buses or taxis.

Ships anchor in the beautiful bay at Villefranche-sur-Mer, a couple of miles from Nice. Many tours are available to such places as Nice, Monaco and the hilltop village of Eze, all good places to visit. It is very easy for those who are comfortable with the idea of using local public transport to get to Nice or Monaco by bus or train, or even Eze by train and bus. Villefranche itself has plenty of bars and restaurants and beaches with slightly gritty sand (still a lot better than the large pebbles at Nice!). A long walk or a short bus ride will get you to the billionaires' enclave of St Jean Cap Ferrat with its Villa Ephrussi Rothschild, well worth a visit, or to the adjacent town of Beaulieu-sur-Mer with more bars, restaurants and beaches and the recent but classical Greek-styled Villa Kerylos, also worth a visit.

This was our third visit to Lisbon and we are nowhere near to exhausting the abundance of interesting places to visit in and around this fascinating city. On our first visit we had been to the city centre, Belem (excellent), the Baillo Alto and Parque Edouard VII, on our second the St George Castle and the Alfama district as well as a half-day tour to the historic town of Obidos. This time we took the train to Sintra, a historic town with many spectacular palaces and a ruined Moorish Castle at the top of a hill. Possibly the most spectacular of the palaces is the Pena, but we chose to visit a fantasy castle of a property called la Reguleira which kept our interest for a good couple of hours. The palaces and Moorish castle (ruins) are spread around the hilly outskirts of Sintra and need more than one day to explore fully. There is one royal palace in the historic town centre but all the others involve catching a local bus. The buses are frequent and cheap. The trains to and from Sintra run every 15 minutes from Rossio station in Lisbon and are also cheap, with a return ticket costing only 4.80 Euros including the 0.50 Euro charge for the reusable electronic card that the details are stored on. A great day out from a great city.