At least 15 people killed and 18 injured in crash of funicular railway in Lisbon

At least 15 people were killed and 18 were injured in a crash of a popular funicular railway in Lisbon, Portugal, on Wednesday, according to local authorities.

Portuguese Prime Minister Luís Montenegro expressed condolences for the victims in a statement and said an investigation has been launched to determine the cause of the accident.

The mayor of Lisbon, Carlos Moedas, announced three days of mourning “for the victims of the tragic accident” on X.

A video posted on social media and verified by NBC News showed a yellow funicular car lying on its side amid scattered debris with the roof cracked open. A separate video verified by NBC News showed people searching through the twisted metal of the wreckage.

The funicular that crashed, the Elevador de Glória, connects Restauradores Square to the Jardim de São Pedro de Alcântara in the Bairro Alto neighborhood. There are two other funicular railways in the city, according to a site run by the Lisbon Tourism Association.

The commander of the Lisbon fire brigade, Alexandre Rodrigues, told a group of journalists that it was alerted about the derailment at 6:01 p.m. and arrived within three minutes.

The funicular car “derailed, crashed into the building, and now the causes will have to be analyzed by the competent authorities,” he said, noting that there was no confirmation yet of the nationalities of the people killed and injured.

Carris, the company that operates the funicular, said in a statement on Wednesday that “all maintenance protocols were carried out and complied with” and that the last repairs were done in 2024.

Manuel Leal, the leader of the Federation of Transport and Communications Workers’ Unions (Fectrans) and the Union of Road and Urban Transport Workers of Portugal (STRUP) said on Wednesday that Carris workers had made “repeated complaints” about the need for maintenance on the funicular carriages, according to the Portuguese state news agency Lusa.

“There must be an investigation into the root causes of this accident, not least because workers have been reporting for a long time that the maintenance of these carriages should be the responsibility of Carris workers and not outsourced to external companies, as is the case with the Glória lift,” he said.