Portugal's metro was the only way of getting around that lost passengers last quarter
73 million people rode the metro between April and June, down 1% on the year and the second falling quarter in a row. Rail was up 6.2%, airports 1.5% and river transport 0.4%. The gap between metro and rail is closing fast.
Between April and June nearly everyone travelled more. Trains carried 62.9 million passengers, up 6.2% on the year. National airports handled 20.8 million, up 1.5%. Even river transport, which had fallen 3.2% at the start of the year, came back to 6.2 million passengers and a 0.4% rise.
The metro was the exception. It carried 73.0 million people in the second quarter, a fall of 1.0% against the same period of 2025, according to the transport statistics release Statistics Portugal put out on Tuesday. It had already dropped 2.2% in the first quarter. That is two consecutive quarters of losing riders, in a year when every other mode gained them.
What happens when you run the figures back a year
INE publishes the quarterly total and the annual change, but not the year-earlier quarter. We applied one to the other to rebuild it, and the result gives the scale.
At 73.0 million and a 1.0% fall, the metro would have carried roughly 73.7 million passengers in the second quarter of 2025. At 62.9 million and 6.2% growth, rail would have been near 59.2 million. So a year ago the metro carried about 14.5 million more passengers than the railway, and now it carries about 10.1 million more. The gap closed by roughly four and a half million in twelve months.
These are approximations, because they start from totals INE has already rounded. The direction holds either way you round.
Freight is doing the opposite
On the cargo side the pattern flips. Road freight fell 3.6% and rail freight 2.2%, while sea freight rose 5.0% and air freight 1.0%, both after declines in the first quarter. Gas through pipelines grew most of all, up 14.3% on entry and 15.0% on exit.
For people, though, the reading is single. The railway is in a heavy investment phase, with the state deciding concessions such as the high-speed section between Oiã and Soure, which drew two bids after attracting none in 2024, and aviation keeps tracking a tourism sector that, even with Greater Lisbon braking, took €923.7m in July. The metro is the one going backwards while everything around it goes forwards.
Photo: Draceane / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
