It’s often only when something breaks that you learn how it works. Occasionally, I use the funiculars dotted around Lisbon to quickly navigate steep, sweat-inducing hills. They don’t feel dangerous; a touch precarious, perhaps, but only because the fin-de-siecle contraptions, with their angular poise against the steep inclines and narrow wooden benches, seem so unlikely. But I hadn’t thought about how they actually function until the tragic accident at the Elevador da Glória last week: two carriages at either end of the climb, connected under the track by a haulage wire in perfect balance, provide a counterweight to propel each other, with the help of an electric cable overhead.
Last Wednesday evening, during rush hour, a cable connecting two of those carriages reportedly disconnected, causing the higher one to careen downhill, derailing and crashing into a nearby building at high speed. Sixteen people were killed with 20 more injured; five are still in a critical condition.
According to preliminary observations by Portuguese officials, the funicular’s scheduled maintenance plan was up to date and no anomalies had been discovered in the cable or braking systems before the crash. But two separate investigations remain under way. There also continues to be much debate about underlying issues at play, all of which is feeding into the city and its discontents.
An early line from Público newspaper – “Cable breakage exposes fragile maintenance of Lisbon elevator ‘overloaded’ with tourists” – made me think about how much of the global coverage of the incident talked about the funicular only as a tourist attraction. Some of this is natural given that the victims included people from the US to South Korea. But five Portuguese people also died: the carriage’s brakeman and four employees of Santa Casa da Misericórdia, a charitable organisation that has an office nearby.
On Thursday, Público also reported that the funiculars’ maintenance regime had been reduced since Carris, the city’s transit company, outsourced the work to private contractors more than a decade ago. (Although it has not responded to this claim, Carris has insisted that the maintenance protocols for the funicular were “scrupulously followed”.) Mensagem, an independent publication, resurfaced a 2021 interview with a retiring Carris engineer bemoaning the apparent loss of institutional knowledge as the number of technical staff was slimmed down. Lisboa Para Pessoas, another online publication, ran a piece defiantly declaring: “The Elevador da Glória ‘accident’ is, in fact, the ‘accident’ of neoliberal Lisbon: but this should also be seen as a symptom of burnout, a symptom of a city in burnout.”
It all speaks to a sense of a city that is overburdened with tourists and underserving its residents. If you have ever taken Lisbon’s famed trams, you will have endured long queues and crowded carriages. Earlier this year, Carris even explored having separate queues for residents and visitors: the funiculars and trams aren’t ornamental, some people need to go places. In a grim twist, anecdotal evidence at the weekend pointed to trams denuded of passengers in the aftermath of the crash.
Any large city is a fragile thing: tragedy can strike out of the blue through a random accident, structural neglect or matters more nefarious. This seems particularly so in a beautiful old city such as Lisbon, which exists in wildly varying states of preservation and dereliction. On the same day as the Glória crash, the side of an old residential building collapsed in the rapidly gentrifying Graça neighbourhood. Thankfully, no one was badly hurt but people have been made homeless, at least temporarily. It has been reported that the empty lot next door was in the process of being developed into expensive apartments.
When parts of Lisbon break down, you start to see how the system is working, and who it is working for. Portugal responded to the 2008 financial crash by relaxing rent laws, and creating incentives for international visitors and investors, leading to a huge boom in tourism and real estate. (As a relative newcomer to the city, I can’t absolve myself from my role in these problems either.) This relentless focus on building hotels and attracting foreign investment at the expense of everything else shows little sign of slowing.
As a friend, an architect and academic, wrote, tourism and economic liberalisation have material consequences for a city. When old technologies and buildings are preserved, the knowledge and care that created them needs to be maintained too. While dilapidated buildings have been rehabilitated as a result of the post-2008 policies, those once living in them have often been left behind.
after newsletter promotion
At the end of last week, the city was, and was not, returning to normality. At the scene of the accident on Friday evening, flowers and tributes had been left. TV news teams filmed while more people like me stood around looking helpless, snapping the odd photo. Farther up the hill, workers were clearing the last bits of debris from the crash site. Traffic rumbled as usual and tourists continued to stream by.
Almost opposite the Glória line is another funicular going up a different steep hill. Its two carriages were sitting dormant: all funiculars have been temporarily shut as a precaution. At the top of this hill, the gates at the entrance to the Lavra funicular were closed, and someone had left a single red flower with a green stem. It made me think of the red carnation, the symbol of the Portuguese revolution that overthrew the dictatorship 51 years ago. Every 25 April, people march down Lisbon’s central boulevard carrying carnations: the promise of a better, fairer country for all. It’s also a reminder that wherever you live, such an ideal cannot be taken for granted, it needs to be maintained, replenished and fought for every day.