Lisbon funicular cable snapped before deadly crash, report finds, 6 September 2025

Portuguese officials focused...on establishing the causes of the crash of a Lisbon streetcar popular with tourists that killed 16 people and injured 21, five of them seriously.

“The city needs answers,” Lisbon Mayor Carlos Moedas said in a televised statement about Wednesday’s derailment.

The downtown streetcar, which is known as Elevador da Gloria and is a major attraction for tourists packing the Portuguese capital during the summer season, came off the rails during the evening rush hour. The crumpled wreckage was cordoned off as investigators sifted through the wreckage, took photographs and pulled up a metal cable from beneath the rails that climb one of Lisbon’s steep hills.

Police, public prosecutors and government transport experts are investigating the causes, Prime Minister Luis Montenegro said...The company that operates the streetcar service, Carris, said that it has also opened its own investigation. It said that scheduled maintenance had been carried out.

As well as those, the mayor said he would ask for an investigation from an outside independent body....

Officials declined to comment on whether a faulty brake or a snapped cable may have prompted the descending streetcar to careen into a building where the steep road bends...

The government’s Office for Air and Rail Accident Investigations said that it was working with other bodies on finding out why the streetcar crashed and would issue a preliminary statement on Friday.

Lisbon’s Civil Protection Agency said earlier Thursday that the death toll had risen to 17. It later corrected that to 16, saying there was a lapse due to the duplication of available information.

The dead were all adults...The injured were men and women between the ages of 24 and 65 as well as a 3-year-old child, she said.

The injured included Portuguese people as well as two Germans, two Spaniards and one person each from France, Italy, Switzerland, Canada, Morocco, South Korea and Cape Verde...