The yellow and white funicular had made it just a few yards up the steep Lisbon hill on Wednesday evening, witnesses said, when it jerked to a stop and then began a short free-fall back to the starting block. People fell from their seats and on top of each other, causing injuries and chaos.
They were in the lucky carriage.
The other car running on the same line and connected to the first carriage by a cable system just as suddenly began descending from near the top of the hill at breakneck speed before crashing into a building. At least 16 people died in the crash, which Portugal’s prime minister called “one of the greatest human tragedies in our recent history.”
“They had the whole downhill run in front of them, and they picked up a lot of speed,” said Stefania Lepidi, an Italian scientist who was aboard the first carriage and broke an arm in the accident.
On Thursday, Lisbon was mourning and Portuguese authorities were searching for answers about what caused the tragedy in the country’s hilly capital.
The authorities opened an investigation into the accident, which happened on one of Lisbon’s most popular tourist attractions — a vintage funicular that carried passengers up and down a steep, scenic hill in the center of the city. A local official said the dead included some foreigners, but they have not yet announced the names of the victims. At least 21 other people were injured, the authorities said.
Although some local news outlets initially reported that a cable had most likely come loose, citing firefighters, government officials have not yet confirmed the cause of the accident.
“The city needs answers,” Carlos Moedas, the mayor of Lisbon, said at a news conference on Thursday as the nation observed a day of mourning.
At the site of the crash, a cobblestone street lined with street art and pastel buildings, the roof of the carriage lay sideways on Thursday beside a jumble of metal pieces and broken wooden seats. The street was cordoned off, but people who gathered near the site left bunches of flowers.
The ride on the funicular, called the Elevador da Glória, typically lasts a few minutes and transports passengers to and from the scenic Bairro Alto neighborhood. The accident happened soon after 6 p.m. on Wednesday.
Rescuers rushed to the crash site and took the victims and injured to local hospitals. Among the dead was the driver, André Jorge Gonçalves Marques, the Portuguese transport workers’ union said in a Facebook post.
Ms. Lepidi said that she lay for about two hours on the bloodstained cobblestones, nauseated and with her broken arm, because rescuers were busy pulling victims out of the destroyed carriage. Firefighters walked up the hill with pincers to break through the metal jumble that was left of the car, she said, and rescuers walked downhill carrying stretchers, some covered in cloth.
The funicular “was a symbol,” of Lisbon, she said in a phone call. “I don’t know if it will continue to be.”
Visitors to the city usually wait in long lines to board the funicular. Each of the two vehicles on the line can carry about 40 people. The carriages run in opposite directions and are attached by an underground cable system that runs through a pulley at the top of the hill. They are powered by overhead electric cables, and the weight of the carriage traveling downhill helps lift the other, and they pass each other midway along the route.
On Wednesday, the carriage that crashed was coming downhill and had begun pulling the car near the bottom upward.
Teresa D’Avò, a resident, said on local television that she watched the nightmarish scene unfold from the bottom of the hill. She saw the lower carriage coming down before it hit the barrier at the bottom with a loud bang. She rushed to help but then saw the other carriage coming toward her at “an astronomical velocity.” It approached a curve, tumbled over and crashed into a building, she said.
“We turned around, started running,” she said.
Margarida Castro Martins, the director of Lisbon’s civil protection agency, said at a news conference on Thursday that most of the injured were from abroad. They included Canadian, French, German, Moroccan, Spanish and Swiss nationals, she said.
Ms. Castro Martins initially said on Thursday that the death toll was 17, but the agency later revised it to 16.
The Portuguese forensics institute was performing autopsies overnight and its director, Francisco Corte Real, said that medical examiners had traveled from other parts of the country to help.
Portugal’s prime minister, Luís Montenegro, said at a news conference on Thursday that medical examiners were working to confirm the identifies and nationalities of the victims, and that the government would work to return the bodies of foreign victims to their home countries.
As the authorities searched for the cause of the accident, Mr. Moedas, the mayor, ordered the suspension of operations at the city’s other funiculars, including the popular Elevador da Bica. He also requested technical inspections of all funicular equipment and said that Lisbon’s funiculars would stay closed while the investigation went on. For now, he said, the information available was insufficient to pinpoint the cause: “Everything we can say at this point is merely speculation.”
Several Portuguese agencies are participating in the investigation, according to Ms. Castro Martins. They included the public security police, the criminal investigation division and the office of aircraft and railway accident prevention and investigation.
In 2018, the same funicular line suffered a derailment that caused no injuries. A car “simply came off the tracks and landed on the cobblestones,” the Portuguese newspaper Público wrote at the time. The accident, which the Lisbon public transport company Carris called “a technical issue,” did not seem to cause much alarm.
On Thursday, Carris said in a statement that all maintenance protocols had been followed before the latest accident. It said that general maintenance, which is scheduled to take place every four years, was last performed in 2022 and that an interim checkup was done in 2024. The company added that weekly and daily inspections had been performed.
Carris also said that it had immediately opened an investigation into what happened.
Tiago Carrasco contributed reporting from Lisbon. Samuel Granados and Jonathan Wolfe also contributed reporting.
Emma Bubola is a Times reporter based in Rome.
The post In Portugal Funicular Crash, Survivor and Witnesses Describe Fatal Descent appeared first on New York Times.
