Lisbon goes underground: the Metro opens on 29 December 1959

On Tuesday 29 December 1959 the President of the Republic, Américo Tomás, and the Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon, Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira, went down into Restauradores station in the centre of Lisbon. The newsreel of the day, the Noticiário Nacional, showed them arriving for a blessing on the platform, a formal session in the ticket hall and a ride in one of the new carriages. The Metro's chairman, the engineer Francisco de Mello e Castro, presided over the opening.3 sources3 sources

Everyone else had to wait until the next day. By three in the morning of 30 December there were long queues at the station entrances. Some stations stopped selling tickets for a while so that the crowds would not spill onto the platforms, and at Parque the escalators became an attraction in their own right.2 sources2 sources

In its first two days the Metro carried about 216,000 passengers. With a single line of 6.5 kilometres, Lisbon had the fourteenth underground railway in Europe and the twenty-fifth in the world. London had opened the first in 1863.3 sources3 sources

The line had taken four years to build. Agreeing to build it had taken about seventy.2 sources2 sources

In the 1950s Lisbon got about by tram, by bus and on foot. Artur Machado, who was 13 in 1959 and lived in Rua Augusta, remembered green double-decker buses and the many carts that still brought vegetables into the city. The trams belonged to the Companhia Carris de Ferro de Lisboa. Portugal was ruled by the Estado Novo, the authoritarian regime founded by António de Oliveira Salazar under the constitution of 1933.3 sources3 sources

The Metro's own chronology records a first proposal in 1885, for a line from Santa Apolónia to Algés by way of the Rossio. On 5 May 1888 the military engineer Henrique de Lima e Cunha presented a detailed project, published in the Revista de Obras Públicas e Minas, in which double-track trains would run “now on viaducts above the streets, now in long tunnels” (translated from Portuguese). It had about 14 stations over 5 kilometres by the Metro's account (RTP's history gives 14 kilometres), and it went no further for lack of money.4 sources4 sources

In the 1920s Lisbon City Council received several proposals, from local merchants in 1922 and from other promoters in 1923. A public tender in 1924 drew a single bid, from two businessmen from Madrid, for eight lines totalling 26.8 kilometres. The tender was annulled, run again and awarded to them in 1925, but they asked to change the contract, were refused, and withdrew on 24 May 1926.5 sources5 sources

The idea came back after the Second World War. A decree-law of 24 November 1947 had the state promote feasibility studies, and on 26 January 1948 the company Metropolitano de Lisboa, SARL, was formally set up. The city council held most of the shares, and Carris and private investors held the rest. The company's 2011 sustainability report links the timing to Portugal's economic cooperation agreement with the United States and its entry into the Marshall Plan.3 sources3 sources

On 1 July 1949 the company was granted the concession to build and run the system. Money was still the obstacle. The share capital was not enough. The way out was a decree-law of 28 August 1954 that allowed the company to issue state-guaranteed bonds worth up to 150,000 contos, or 150 million escudos, which the Metro calls decisive in getting construction started.3 sources3 sources

The contracts for the first stage were signed on 11 July 1955. The Metro's chronology of milestones dates the start of work to 1 August 1955, while its company history and later reports give 7 August. The plan was a network of lines running into the heart of the city and out towards its edges, with trams and buses connecting the rest.4 sources4 sources

The digging drew crowds. People queued to peer over the hoardings into the huge holes, so the company cut windows in the boards for them. From 1957 it also handed out leaflets called the Manual do Mirone, the onlooker's handbook, which described the future metro and the building methods used.2 sources2 sources

The works were almost finished by October 1959. To teach the public how to use the Metro and how to stay safe on it, RTP and the Tóbis Portuguesa studio made a short film directed by Artur Duarte, with the broadcaster Artur Agostinho and the actors Gina Mayo and Francisco Calado. It was shown in cinemas.2 sources2 sources

The line was shaped like a Y. From Restauradores, beside the Rossio, it ran north through Avenida to the Rotunda, the roundabout now called Marquês de Pombal. There it split. One branch went through Parque, São Sebastião and Palhavã to Sete Rios, by the zoo, and the other through Picoas, Saldanha and Campo Pequeno to Entre Campos.3 sources3 sources

The trains were the ML7 series. The first order was for 12 two-car units, 24 carriages numbered A-1 to A-24, and every carriage had its own motors. Trains of two carriages ran at up to 60 km/h, with a driver at the front and a guard, the fator, at the back, who warned passengers and driver when the doors opened and closed. By 1975 the fleet had grown to 84 carriages.2 sources2 sources

A single ticket cost 1$50, one and a half escudos, when a tram ride cost 80 centavos. A cheaper 1$00 ticket, meant for working people, was valid on weekdays at the busiest hours: 6 to 10 am, noon to 3 pm and 5 to 8 pm. Tickets bought in books of ten cost 1$35.2 sources2 sources

Francisco Keil do Amaral, the architect of the first stage, designed a standard station: one or two ticket halls linked by stairs to a platform under a low vault. The Metro's station pages credit several of the 1959 stations to the architect Falcão e Cunha, working to that model. The budget kept the spaces small, and Keil do Amaral feared that repeating one design eleven times would make them monotonous. There was no money for decoration.6 sources6 sources

Maria Keil (1914–2012), a painter and illustrator, suggested patterned azulejo, the glazed tile Portuguese builders had used to line churches and palaces since the sixteenth century. In another account she gave, the idea came up between the two of them. “It's ours, it's washable, it's durable, you can give it whatever colour you like, and it was very cheap,” she told Mantas in 2009 (translated from Portuguese).2 sources2 sources

The couple went to the Viúva Lamego factory, which at the time made mostly copies for restoring old panels. Its staff dug out techniques nobody had used for years.1 source1 source

An order from above banned figurative images, on the grounds that pictures would distract hurrying passengers, especially on the stairs. So Keil designed abstract compositions, a different one for each station, built from a module of one or a few tiles varied in scale, proportion and colour. At Palhavã, now Praça de Espanha, she set white and yellow against green and grey in a diamond-point module, so that the flat wall seems to stand out in relief.2 sources2 sources

She passed the eleventh station, Avenida, to the painter Rogério Ribeiro, at her own suggestion, and she was paid for none of it. “They didn't pay me anything, nineteen stations for love of the architect!” she told the weekly Expresso in 2004, counting the stations she tiled up to 1972 (translated from Portuguese).2 sources2 sources

Much of that first work has gone. Panels were partly or wholly removed when stations were enlarged in the 1970s and remodelled in the 1990s, notably at Restauradores, São Sebastião and Saldanha, on the assumption that keeping a sample of a “pattern” was enough. The Museu Nacional do Azulejo holds a large collection of her drawings and tiles for the Metro.1 source1 source

The network grew in steps. Rossio station opened on 27 January 1963, and Socorro, Intendente and Anjos on 28 September 1966. On 18 June 1972 five more, from Arroios to Alvalade, completed what the company calls the first stage of the network: 20 stations and 12 kilometres. Maria Keil tiled those too, and the extension to Alvalade raised passenger numbers by 35 per cent on the same half-year a year earlier.3 sources3 sources

Then construction stopped for sixteen years, for economic reasons. After the revolution of 25 April 1974 the company was nationalised, on 5 June 1975, and it became a state enterprise in 1978. Money went instead into lengthening platforms built for two carriages, so that longer trains could run. In 1979, its twentieth year, the Metro passed 100 million passengers a year.2 sources2 sources

New stations opened again in October 1988, four of them, giving 24 stations and about 16 kilometres. In 1993 Campo Grande became the first station above ground, on a viaduct. Then the Y was undone. The last train through the Rotunda junction ran in the early hours of 14 April 1995, and by the summer (RTP dates the separation to July) the network ran as two separate lines, the Blue and the Yellow.4 sources4 sources

The biggest leap came in 1998. A fire at Alameda station on 19 October 1997 had halted part of the network until March. In April the Green Line reached Cais do Sodré, on the river, and on 19 May the Red Line opened from Alameda to Oriente, the station for Expo '98, the world exhibition in eastern Lisbon. It was the first wholly new line since 1959 and the first to run six-carriage trains.4 sources4 sources

In August the Blue Line reached Baixa-Chiado, which gave the Metro four separate lines linked to each other, to the suburban railways and to the river ferries. Baixa-Chiado was designed by Álvaro Siza, who was also rebuilding the Chiado district after the fire of 1988.3 sources3 sources

In 2004 the Metro crossed the city boundary for the first time, reaching Odivelas on the Yellow Line in March and Amadora Este on the Blue Line in May. The Blue Line reached Santa Apolónia station in 2007, the Red Line reached São Sebastião in 2009 and the airport in July 2012, and in April 2016 the Blue Line was extended to Reboleira. The network now has 56 stations and 44.5 kilometres of line.2 sources2 sources

Until the early 1970s Maria Keil was almost the only artist working in the stations. The chairman appointed in 1988, José Manuel Consiglieri Pedroso, brought in a new approach to art in the Metro, and from 1991 the company invited many architects and artists, Portuguese and foreign, to design and decorate stations, still with a strong preference for azulejo.2 sources2 sources

At Cidade Universitária, opened in 1988, Manuel Cargaleiro turned a 1940 gouache by Maria Helena Vieira da Silva into the tile panel Le Métro. At Parque, redecorated in 1994, the Belgian artist Françoise Schein lined the station in cobalt-blue tiles carrying the thirty articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and maps of the Portuguese voyages, with sculptures by the French artist Federica Matta.2 sources2 sources

When Jardim Zoológico was rebuilt in 1995, the painter Júlio Resende spent two years at the Viúva Lamego factory painting tropical animals and plants for its walls. For Oriente, the Expo station, the Metro invited eleven artists from five continents to work on the theme of the oceans, among them Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Yayoi Kusama, Erró, Zao Wou-Ki and Magdalena Abakanowicz.2 sources2 sources

Olaias, designed by the architect Tomás Taveira, has bright polychrome finishes and a monumental colonnade over the platforms. Exchanges with other metro systems brought a Hector Guimard Art Nouveau entrance, a gift from the Paris metro, to Picoas in 1995.3 sources3 sources

In its first year of operation the Metro carried 15.3 million passengers by the company's count; the Diário de Notícias has put the figure for 1960 at nearly 16 million. By 1979 the yearly total had passed 100 million, and in 1988 it was about 136 million.4 sources4 sources

Since 2000 ridership has been highest in 2005, at 185.4 million. It fell during the economic crisis to about 135 million in 2013 and 2014, and climbed back to 183.1 million in 2019. The pandemic halved it in 2020 and 2021. In 2025 the Metro carried 173.5 million passengers, 1.8 per cent fewer than in 2024.7 sources7 sources

The next change will reshape the map again. Two new stations, Estrela and Santos, and about two kilometres of line between Rato and Cais do Sodré will join the Yellow and Green lines into a circular line around central Lisbon. In 2019 the Metro expected to open the new stations in 2024. In March 2026 its chair, Cristina Vaz Tomé, told parliament the line would open in the first quarter of 2027, putting the delay at three years and three months. The company's 2025 report, signed in June 2026, gives the same date.3 sources3 sources

A Red Line extension from São Sebastião to Alcântara and a light-rail Violet Line between Odivelas and Loures are also planned. Porto, the country's second city, has had its own metro, a light-rail network, since December 2002.3 sources3 sources