The yellow-and-white funicular had made it just a few yards up a 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 one another, causing injuries and chaos.
They were in the lucky carriage.
Just as suddenly, the car running on the parallel line and connected to the first carriage by a cable system began descending from near the top of the hill, accelerating to breakneck speed before crashing into a building, killing at least 16 people.
Passengers inside the plummeting car shrieked in terror. “What I heard wasn’t the squeaking of the tram that went down,” said Teresa D’Avo, a witness. “It was the sound of people’s screaming.”
On Thursday, Lisbon was mourning and Portuguese authorities were searching for answers about what caused the crash of one of Lisbon’s most popular tourist attractions, the Elevador da Glória. Portugal’s prime minister called it “one of the greatest human tragedies in our recent history.”
The authorities opened an investigation into the accident on the vintage funicular, which carried passengers up and down a steep, scenic slope in the center of the hilly city. A local official said the dead included some foreigners, but the names of the victims have not been announced yet. At least 21 survivors were injured, the authorities said.
The two cars of a funicular act as counterweights to each other, one climbing as the other descends, usually at a leisurely pace. The ride on the Elevador da Glória typically lasts a few minutes, as the carriage proceeds along the cobblestoned Glória walk, lined with street art and pastel buildings, connecting the Bairro Alto neighborhood to the broad boulevard running through the heart of the city below.
The fact that both cars dropped fast and simultaneously caused speculation, including in local news media, that the underground cable connecting them had either come loose or broken, but government officials have not yet commented.
“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.
One witness, Bruno Gonçalves Pereira, said that, after becoming unmoored, the upper carriage gained a frenzied speed, struck a lamppost and a street corner and smashed into a mangled heap against a wall with a deafening thud. A cloud of gray dust, and absolute silence, filled the alley.
At the site of the crash, the roof of the carriage lay sideways on Thursday beside a jumble of metal pieces and broken wooden seats.
Rescuers rushed to the crash site and took the victims and those who had been injured to local hospitals. Among the dead was the funicular’s driver, André Jorge Gonçalves Marques, the Portuguese transport workers’ union said in a Facebook post, as well as an American citizen, the U.S. State Department said.
In the aftermath of the crash, Mr. Gonçalves Pereira said, an older woman, emerging from the wreckage, walked toward him, took his hand, and then collapsed onto him.
“She died in that moment,” he said. “It was the first time someone died so close to me.”
Stefania Lepidi, an Italian scientist who was aboard the lower carriage, suffered a broken arm. She said that she had lain on the bloodstained cobblestones for about two hours, nauseous with pain, because rescuers were busy pulling victims out of the destroyed carriage.
Firefighters walked up the hill with power tools 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, which has run in various forms for 140 years, “was a symbol” of Lisbon, Ms. Lepidi 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. The two cars, each able to carry about 40 people, are linked by a cable that runs through a pulley at the top of the hill. The system is powered by overhead electric wires, and on each trip the cars pass each other midway along the route.
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 the number to 16.
The Portuguese forensics institute performed 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 the 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, Mayor Moedas 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, including 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 a 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.
Mr. Gonçalves Pereira used to take strolls on Glória walk, charmed by the neighborhood’s cosmopolitan atmosphere and its record stores. He later bought an apartment on the lane, and lived there for 10 years, sometimes watching the funicular cars go up and down.
Now, a new image has replaced more than a decade of memories of that street. It was that of a child he saw at the crash site, he said, “crying, blood dripping from his head to his sandals, holding out his arms as if trying to find any lap.”
Tiago Carrasco contributed reporting from Lisbon. Samuel Granados and Jonathan Wolfe also contributed reporting.
Emma Bubola is a Times reporter based in Rome.
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