I am not telling you to change your travel style, but we happened to use a packaged local bus company tour for a day, which did Evora and a couple of other sites, returning to Lisbon in the early evening. We did this not because we're terrified of independent travel (we later rented a car, which we returned in Porto, I think.) It was just a way to see several key sights in a single day, with no navigation efforts, parking, and so on. It was a short walk in Lisbon from our hotel to the tour company.
One point of this is that the usual objections to these tours ("You get little free time at the location ... ", for example) means you know that you will be back on the air conditioned 49-passenger bus after a fixed interval of time, and off to the next location. I agree that Americans often hate being on someone else's schedule, (or worse, having someone else at the wheel!) but I'm just making a suggestion.
Our trip was so long ago that I'm not going to try to look up the company, but this seems like an area where (absent a personal recommendation) the bigger, the better. And there are online reviews today.