Santa Apolónia station opens on the Lisbon waterfront: 1 May 1865

On 11 February 1865 Angel Arribas Ugarte, the engineer who directed the firm building the Leste and Norte lines, wrote to the president of Lisbon's city council. The Praia dos Algarves, a strip of beach on the Tagus where, according to the Lisbon historian Norberto de Araújo, boats from the Algarve used to land, was almost filled in. Next to it stood the new main station of the Leste and Norte lines, and Arribas wanted to know what paving the council planned for the square in front.1 source1 source

He also asked permission to knock down the latrines and the parapet that still stood on the beach. The council replied on 17 March that they had already been demolished. Six weeks later, on 1 May 1865, the station was officially opened.2 sources2 sources

The accounts used for this article record the date but not the ceremony. What they do describe is the building: a long, plain, two-storey block on the waterfront, wrapped around an iron and glass train shed, on a narrow strip between the houses of eastern Lisbon and the river. With changes, it is the same building Lisbon uses today.2 sources2 sources

Portugal's first railway, from Lisbon to Carregado, opened on 28 October 1856 (that story is told in its own article). Its Lisbon end was a stopgap. The trains left from the former convent of Santa Apolónia, at the corner of the street of that name, opposite the Calçada dos Barbadinhos, some way east of today's station.2 sources2 sources

The convent had housed women in religious retreat until 1833; from 1834 it took in the boys of the Casa Pia, Lisbon's charity school. The railway took it over and made do with it, adding sheds and offices. Goods went to a separate yard further east, in old fish-oil warehouses that the first railway company bought from the Misericórdia of Lisbon in December 1856 for 16,200,000 réis.1 source1 source

Salamanca's builders worked fast. The Leste reached the Spanish border beyond Elvas in September 1863, and in July 1864 the Norte was finished as far as Vila Nova de Gaia, across the Douro from Porto. By the end of 1864 the two lines that ran out of Lisbon added up to about 500 kilometres. The convent at the Lisbon end had only ever been a temporary station.2 sources2 sources

Where to put the terminus had been argued over since the early 1850s. Engineers proposed Intendente, Arroios, Beato and Xabregas, all inland or further east. João Crisóstomo de Abreu e Sousa and Carlos Lobo d'Ávila insisted that the line should start by the Tagus, where goods could pass between trains and ships, and in an official letter of 8 March 1855 the government fixed the starting point at the Cais dos Soldados.1 source1 source

The Cais dos Soldados was an old artillery barracks on the waterfront, near the Army Arsenal, a big irregular building with a yard closed by iron railings. A contractor, António Ferreira de Almeida, agreed in 1860 to pull it down for 2,900,000 réis. To win more ground, the company filled in the caldeiras, the little anchorages along the shore, from May 1860, using its own locomotives and wagons to bring the earth.1 source1 source

The government's Council of Public Works blew hot and cold about the space. In December 1861 it found the planned station rather narrow. On 1 May 1862 it approved the façades and judged that four tracks would do even if traffic grew a great deal.1 source1 source

Then, in a second opinion on 19 July signed by almost the same members, it found the whole site too narrow and irregular for the passenger and goods sheds, the workshops and the engine house. Four tracks were now enough for ordinary trains but not for specials once traffic grew. Abragão could not explain the change of mind.1 source1 source

The council asked for a wider street on the north side, an entrance facing a square to the west and a quay along the river. The government's inspecting engineer went further and suggested demolishing the Army Arsenal next door to make room. That never happened, and the station was squeezed into the strip between the houses and the water.2 sources2 sources

The first stone was laid on 4 September 1862, on the ground of the demolished barracks. The record of the ceremony names the director engineer of Salamanca's construction firm, Eusébio Page, and the chief engineer of its first section, Nicolas Le Crenier, and calls the building the future main station of the railways from Lisbon to Badajoz and to the city of Porto.1 source1 source

The plans bore the names of Angel Arribas Ugarte, the firm's chief engineer João Evangelista de Abreu and Le Crenier. The French firm C.A. Oppermann did the building, under an engineer named Agnés. The south front was founded on rock, laid dry at the low water of spring tides.2 sources2 sources

The iron roof of the train shed came from James Blair of Glasgow, who travelled to Lisbon to oversee its assembly. It did not go smoothly. Some of the first trusses collapsed after they had been put up, and the design had to be changed; Abragão, writing in 1956, could find no record of why.1 source1 source

The square in front caused a quarrel. In August 1863 the government ordered the company to build a square at least 20 metres wide before the main façade and to fill in the Praia dos Algarves. The company asked to be let off, saying its contract did not oblige it to do such work. On 30 October 1863, in an order signed by the Duke of Loulé, then head of the government, the government answered that it was not asking for public squares, only a station people could enter and leave without danger. A station was more than its walls, it said, and it would not accept the building until the work was done.1 source1 source

The filling was contracted on 19 August 1864 with Francisco Goullard and was due to finish by 8 October. In January 1865 it was still not done, and the firm told its chief engineer to put men and carts to work at the contractor's expense unless Goullard speeded up and finished by 15 February. A few days before that deadline Arribas wrote his letter about the paving.1 source1 source

After the opening, the paperwork followed. On 29 July 1865 the chief engineer of the government's inspectorate formally received the building, and Arribas handed it to the Companhia Real, represented by its director-general, Eduardo Goudchaux. The total cost was 255,164,000 réis.1 source1 source

The writer Vilhena Barbosa described the new station for the magazine Archivo Pittoresco, which printed the engraving at the top of this page. The building was 135 metres long, 50.40 metres wide and 13 metres high. Its long sides faced north, to the street of the Cais dos Soldados, and south, to the Tagus; trains came in through the open east end. Passengers entered from the north and left by the west front, so that the cabs and omnibuses had a square on each side.1 source1 source

On the ground floor were a royal waiting room, a shed for 22 carriages, waiting rooms for first, second and third class, baggage offices, the municipal customs post, the government's inspectors, a health office, the telegraph, the station master and cafés and eating houses. Upstairs were the boardroom and the offices of every department of the Companhia Real, from traffic to accounts.1 source1 source

Not everyone was impressed. Abragão, an engineer writing for the centenary of Portugal's railways, judged the station architecturally modest and short of room to grow.1 source1 source

Until the summer of 1865 Salamanca's construction firm had run the trains itself. On 25 June 1865 it handed the Leste and Norte lines to the Companhia Real, which set up its own operating departments under Goudchaux.1 source1 source

From 6 August 1865 three trains a day left Santa Apolónia for Gaia, two ran between Entroncamento and Badajoz and one between Lisbon and Entroncamento. All carried the three classes and took about 12 hours by day. The Porto and Badajoz trains travelled together as far as Entroncamento, where they split. Night mail trains reached Gaia in 10 hours and the border in 11.1 source1 source

For the International Exhibition held in Porto that year, the company started a fast train on 17 September 1865, first and second class only, that ran from Lisbon to Gaia in 8 hours. It was withdrawn on 4 February 1866, after the exhibition closed, and brought back for good on 7 April. On a trial run the company said it had touched 82 kilometres an hour.1 source1 source

For a quarter of a century Santa Apolónia was where Lisbon met the trains from Porto and Spain. On 19 May 1886 Princess Amélie of Orléans arrived there with her parents, the Count and Countess of Paris, three days before her wedding to Crown Prince Carlos. The magazine O Occidente reported that the station was hung with flags, coats of arms and garlands of flowers, and that the crowd filling the train shed was enormous.1 source1 source

In 1887 the Wagons-Lits company launched the Sud-Express, which linked Lisbon with Madrid, Paris and Calais. At first it ran over the Leste line and entered Spain at Valencia de Alcántara; from 1895 it took the Beira Alta line instead.1 source1 source

Santa Apolónia lay off-centre, east of the Baixa, Lisbon's commercial district. To fix that, the Companhia Real dug a tunnel under the city and built Rossio station, in the heart of town, and a ring line linked it with the Norte. CP dates Rossio to 1890; the Gazeta's table of openings and IP give 1891. The international trains, the Sud-Express among them, and the long-distance trains to Porto moved there.3 sources3 sources

Santa Apolónia did not stand still. Early in the twentieth century a third storey was added, and the two upper floors became offices of the railway companies, with passengers kept to the ground floor. On 28 April 1957 the Sintra line out of Rossio and the first stretch of the Norte were electrified, as part of the railway centenary. Rossio became a suburban station, and the long-distance and international trains came back to Santa Apolónia, whose platforms were lengthened for them.2 sources2 sources

The station was also a stage for politics. In May 1958, during the presidential campaign of the opposition candidate Humberto Delgado, there were clashes with the police at Santa Apolónia when he returned to Lisbon from his rally in Porto.1 source1 source

In 1998 Santa Apolónia lost ground again, to the new Gare do Oriente built for Expo '98. In December 2007 the Metro's Blue Line reached it, with a stop of its own beside the station, which brought it closer to the rest of the city.2 sources2 sources

The station is still kilometre 0.000 of the Linha do Norte, Portugal's main line. It is the terminus for long-distance trains to Porto and the north and for regional and suburban trains to Azambuja. In 2022 about 3,706,600 passengers passed through it.3 sources3 sources

In 2019 Infraestruturas de Portugal (IP), the state company that manages the building, awarded a 35-year sub-concession for a hotel of at least 120 rooms inside it. The Editory Riverside Santa Apolónia Hotel opened in February 2022 after a €12 million conversion, with 126 rooms in the east wing and the upper floors of the central block, according to the Diário de Notícias; IP calls the hotel wing the south wing, facing the Tagus. Its Sala Nobre, the main reception room, kept a nineteenth-century stucco ceiling, restored to its original design.3 sources3 sources

A third and last phase of repairs to the walls, canopies and stonework, costing about €190,000, was completed by early 2024. It replastered and repainted them in the building's original colour, a deep red the Portuguese call sangue-de-boi, ox blood.1 source1 source

The trains that once made it a gateway to Europe are gone. The Sud Express and the Lusitânia night train to Madrid, which ran coupled together from Lisboa-Apolónia as far as Medina del Campo, were halted by CP and Renfe, the Spanish railway, in March 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic. CP promised in June 2020 to restart them once the border reopened, but in December 2025 campaigners were still gathering at Santa Apolónia to ask for them back.3 sources3 sources