News 3 August 2026

Viana do Castelo's Eiffel bridge goes out to tender for a €7.5m reinforcement

Infraestruturas de Portugal published the contract notice on Monday. Bids close at 17:00 on 28 August and the winning contractor gets 570 days to strengthen the double-deck crossing over the Lima.

Infraestruturas de Portugal opened a public tender on Monday to strengthen the Eiffel bridge at Viana do Castelo, the iron crossing that carries traffic over the river Lima on the edge of the city. The work is budgeted at €7.5 million and the notice appeared in the official gazette today.

This is structural, not cosmetic. The contract covers reinforcement against braking forces and an upgrade to load class d4, the rating that sets how much weight a stretch of railway can carry. In plain terms: heavier trains, harder braking, and a structure built to take both.

One bridge, two decks

Anyone who has crossed it knows the layout. The upper deck carries the EN13 national road; the lower deck carries the Linha do Minho railway. That is why a fairly modest-sounding contract lands on two networks at once.

On the north bank the crossing serves the parishes of Viana do Castelo (Santa Maria Maior and Monserrate) and Meadela. On the south bank it reaches Darque, at Cais Novo. For anyone living in Darque and working across the water, this is the daily commute.

The dates that matter

Bids must be in by 17:00 on 28 August, and contractors are bound to hold their offers for 120 days from that deadline. Once the contract is awarded, the builder gets 570 days to finish, a little over eighteen months.

What the notice does not say is how traffic will be managed while the work goes on. Lusa asked Infraestruturas de Portugal and had not received an answer by the time of publication. That is the question most likely to matter to the people who use the bridge, and for now it is open.

The reinforcement joins a run of state spending on northern rail infrastructure, following Alstom’s decision to put a rail maintenance plant in Matosinhos. The technical documents are published through Infraestruturas de Portugal.

By Marta Carneiro

Image: Krzysztof Golik / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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