Lisbon's Glória funicular will be rebuilt from scratch, and it will not carry anyone before 2029
Carris plans an international design-and-build tender in the first quarter of 2027. The incline and the street stay as they are; the mechanism will be an entirely new system.
Carris has stopped using the word rebuild. Whatever replaces the Glória funicular will be a new installation designed from nothing, not a safer copy of the car that ran away down the hill on 3 September 2025 and killed 16 people.
Company president Rui Lopo set out the thinking on Monday at the Ordem dos Engenheiros in Lisbon. The dates are the part that will travel: an international design-and-build tender in the first quarter of 2027, and a working funicular in 2029, as reported from the presentation by RTP.
What stays and what goes
The street stays. Carris takes the view that the heritage here is not the machine but the whole thing at once — the alignment, the gradient, the buildings crowding in on both sides, the memory of a climb that has been made there for more than 140 years. Someone walking up the Calçada da Glória in three years should recognise where they are.
The system goes. The technical solution will be designed during the tender itself, which means nobody has yet chosen the mechanism, the brakes or the way the cars will be hauled. That is the delicate part. The preliminary investigation pointed at the cable and the braking system, so the new installation is being born with an obligation to answer that question before it answers any other.
The remaining guidelines read as you would expect. Absolute safety for passengers, staff and bystanders, using the best international practice available. A modern technical solution that still respects the identity of a listed national monument. And a ride that works for wildly different passengers, from tourists with rucksacks to the people who actually live on the hill.
Why will Lisbon’s Gloria funicular only reopen in 2029?
Three years sounds long for 260 metres of track. It stops sounding long once you count what sits inside it: writing a specification for a system that does not exist yet, running an international tender that can be challenged, digging into a slope in central Lisbon where archaeology turns up unannounced, then building and testing the thing.
One piece will not arrive in time to shape the design. The final crash report has slipped to the end of the first quarter of 2027, landing at roughly the same moment as the tender. Portugal’s rail and air accident investigator has already issued six safety recommendations, four to Carris and two to the regulator IMT, and both accepted them. Those, rather than the final conclusions, are what the new funicular will be drawn around.
Until then it is the stairs, or the 51E bus Carris put on as a substitute. Three more years of the Calçada without a yellow car on it.
Image: Jakub Hałun / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0), June 2025
