The authorities in Portugal opened an investigation on Thursday into the crash of a vintage Lisbon funicular that killed at least 16 people.
The funicular is one of Lisbon’s most popular tourist attractions, and a local official said the dead included some foreigners. At least 21 other people were injured in the crash early Wednesday evening, authorities said.
The vehicle lost control as it was traveling down a steep slope in the center of Lisbon, Portugal’s hilly capital. Although some local news outlets initially reported that a cable had most likely come loose, citing firefighters, other authorities have not confirmed the cause of the accident.
“The city needs answers,” Carlos Moedas, the mayor of Lisbon, said at a news conference on Thursday.
The government declared a national 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 at the site left bunches of flowers.
The ride on the funicular, called the Elevador da Glória, typically lasts only a few minutes and transports passengers to and from the scenic Bairro Alto neighborhood. The accident happened just after 6 p.m., when one of the two yellow-and-white carriages hurtled into a building.
Rescuers rushed to the crash site on Wednesday 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.
Visitors usually wait in long lines to board the funicular. Each of the two vehicles on the line can carry about 40 people. The funicular has two interconnected carriages powered by overhead electric cables. 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. The weight of the carriage as it travels downhill helps lift the other, and they pass each other midway along the route.
Teresa D’Avò, a resident, said on local television that she saw one of the carriages coming down the hill a short way before it stopped with a loud bang. She rushed to help but then saw the other carriage coming down very quickly from above. She said that carriage was traveling at “an astronomical velocity” when it approached a curve, fell over and crashed into a building.
“We turned around, started running, and the moment I looked back, I remember seeing someone on the sidewalk, right at the moment the tram hit,” she said. It was unclear whether some pedestrians were among the dead and injured.
Most of the injured were foreign nationals, Margarida Castro Martins, the director of Lisbon’s civil protection agency, said at a news conference on Thursday. They included Canadian, French, German, Moroccan, Spanish and Swiss nationals, she said. An Italian woman broke her arm in the crash, a spokeswoman for the Italian Foreign Ministry said. Ms. Castro Martins initially said that the total death toll had risen to 17, but the agency later revised it to 16.
The Portuguese forensics institute was performing autopsies overnight. The institute’s director, Francisco Corte Real, said that medical examiners had traveled from other parts of the country to help with the autopsies.
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, the mayor of Lisbon, Carlos 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. They included the public security police, the criminal investigation division and the office of aircraft and railway accident prevention and investigation.
The Lisbon public transport company, Carris, said in a statement that all maintenance protocols had been followed. 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 said that it had also 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.
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