Ascensor da Bica

Of Lisbon's old funiculars, the Bica is the one that belongs most completely to its street. One car climbs and the other descends along Rua da Bica de Duarte Belo, a narrow lane squeezed between old houses, and for some seventy metres the rails run in the roadway itself — unique among Portuguese funiculars — with only residents' cars allowed to share it. Looking up the slope from the bottom, or down it from the top, gives one of the most photographed views in Lisbon, and it is the picture that sums up the Bica quarter: steep, intimate, lived-in.

The line opened on 28 June 1892, designed by the Portuguese engineer Raoul Mesnier du Ponsard. It is short — well under 300 metres, on a gradient of about 12 per cent — and runs from Rua de São Paulo, down by the riverside district of Cais do Sodré, up to Largo do Calhariz and Calçada do Combro on the edge of the Bairro Alto and Chiado. The first cars were moved by water counterweight, the descending car filling a tank so that gravity hauled its partner uphill; steam followed, and in the 1910s the line was electrified.

The two cars remain permanently tied to opposite ends of one cable, balancing each other as they pass halfway, and each carries a couple of dozen passengers. A detail easy to miss: the lower terminus is not on the open street but tucked inside a building on Rua de São Paulo, whose façade still announces "Ascensor da Bica". Operated by the city transport company Carris, the funicular was classified as a National Monument in 2002 — a working piece of nineteenth-century Lisbon.

Getting there

The funicular is in central Lisbon, about 2 km from the city centre. Cais do Sodré metro station (green line) is roughly a five-minute walk from the lower station on Rua de São Paulo; the upper end is a short walk from Chiado. Lisbon Humberto Delgado Airport (LIS) is about 8 km away.