Lisbon Public Transport

The rule that saves money is that every fare except the on-board ones lives on the navegante card, and the card itself is €0.50. Zapping is stored credit, charged per ride; the 24-hour tickets are loaded whole and start at first validation, not at midnight. Children under 4 travel free on the metro when accompanied and not occupying a seat.

What the tariff leaves out

Two things the tariff does not say. The 24-hour ticket is printed as valid 'on the entire network', and Carris's own note says it does not include the lifts and funiculars; while they are closed the question is academic, but do not expect the €7.25 ticket to open a funicular when they reopen. And there is no 48- or 72-hour transport-only pass: three days means three 24-hour loads, or the Lisboa Card, which is the only multi-day product and adds the monuments.

A weekly or monthly navegante pass exists for residents and is not sold as a tourist product.

The card is sold at every metro station's machines, in English, for €0.50, and at Carris shops; it is a paper-backed contactless card that lasts a year and holds one product at a time, so a 24-hour ticket and zapping credit cannot sit on it together. Buy one card per person: the operators state one user per trip, and an inspector fines a shared card. Load it, then validate on every boarding, at the metro gate, at the yellow post inside a bus or tram, at the ferry pier; on the metro you also tap out. A single ticket lasts 60 minutes on Carris and Metro from first validation and does not allow two metro entries in a row, which is the rule that catches anyone who leaves a station to change lines.

The Lisbon city guide homepage has the how-many-days planner that decides how many 24-hour loads you need. The cheapest way to get around Lisbon is therefore zapping on the card at €1.72 a ride, or a contactless bank card at the metro gate at €1.92 if you would rather not buy anything; the 24-hour ticket at €7.25 wins from the fifth ride. The official website for fares is metrolisboa.pt for the metro and carris.pt for buses and trams, both with English pages; the navegante app shows balances but the operators' pages do not state that it sells the occasional-card products to visitors, so we do not print it as a way to pay. Bolt and Uber operate in the city and their fares, like taxi fares, are not published on any official page we could read.

The airport is inside the city and the metro's red line has its terminus, Aeroporto, in the terminal. There is no airport supplement in the 2026 tariff: the standard €1.90 single, €1.72 zapping or €1.92 contactless fare takes you to Oriente in four stops, to Saldanha and São Sebastião without a change, and to Baixa with one change (green line at Alameda, or blue at São Sebastião). Metro de Lisboa does not state a journey time to the centre on its pages.

Two Carris buses stop at the terminal: 744 to Restauradores at the top of Baixa, about 07:00 to 21:30 on the August 2026 timetable and extended to Restauradores since 6 November, and 783 to Amoreiras via Saldanha, whose timetable did not display on the Carris page. The airport's own transport page is rendered by script and returned no text to us, so the Aerobus coach's status, the luggage rules and the taxi rank fares are not stated here.

The last 200 metres

Metro stations in the centre are mostly step-free with lifts, but the last 200 metres to a hotel in Alfama, Bairro Alto or upper Chiado are on cobbles and stairs a wheeled case does not like; the where to stay page says which areas a car can reach. The Lisboa Card is collected at the Ask Me Lisboa desk in arrivals and covers the metro from that moment.

Blue (Azul) runs from Santa Apolónia by the cruise terminal through Terreiro do Paço, Baixa-Chiado and Restauradores to Marquês de Pombal and the north-west; green (Verde) from Cais do Sodré through Baixa-Chiado and Rossio to Alameda and Telheiras; yellow (Amarela) from Rato through Marquês de Pombal and Saldanha to Odivelas; red (Vermelha) from São Sebastião through Saldanha and Alameda to Oriente and the airport. Trains run 06:30 to 01:00, with those as the last departures from the terminals. The stops a visitor uses: Terreiro do Paço and Baixa-Chiado for the centre, Cais do Sodré for the Cascais train and the ferries, Rossio for the Sintra train, Martim Moniz for the tram 28 terminus, São Sebastião for the Gulbenkian, Oriente for the Oceanário and the Évora and Porto trains.

Belém, Alfama and the castle have no metro; the tram, the bus and your feet do those. Official maps are on metrolisboa.pt; the Lisbon transport map below pins the interchanges.

Carris runs the yellow historic trams and the modern articulated ones on the same fares: €1.72 zapping, €1.90 single, the 24-hour ticket, or €3.30 from the driver. Tram 28 is famous because its route from Martim Moniz through Alfama, Baixa, Chiado and Estrela to Campo de Ourique is a tour of the old city for a Carris fare, and that is why it is full at the terminus by 10:00; the tram 28 page has the route, the queue and the alternatives, and the tram 28 ride with a walking tour is the guided version. Tram 15E is the working tram to Belém from Praça da Figueira and Praça do Comércio, articulated and cashless. Tram 12 loops through Alfama and the castle hill from Martim Moniz; tram 24 climbs from Cais do Sodré to Chiado and Príncipe Real.

Buses that matter: 737 from Praça da Figueira to the castle gate, 744 and 783 to the airport, 728 along the river between Belém and the eastern waterfront, and the three replacement lines for the closed funiculars, 51E for the Glória, 22B for the Bica and 19B for the Lavra. The Rede da Madrugada night network (lines 201, 202, 206, 207, 208, 210 and others) runs 23:30–05:35 every night with extra 02:00 departures from Cais do Sodré, on the same card fares. Timetables live on carris.pt per line; the hop-on hop-off bus, tram and boat ticket at €47 for 72 hours is a sightseeing seat with commentary and does not replace any of this.

On 3 September 2025 the Glória funicular derailed on its descent to Restauradores, and Carris closed the Glória, Bica and Lavra funiculars and the Santa Justa lift; a Carris note of 2 October 2025 made the closure indefinite pending the LNEC, IST and Ordem dos Engenheiros commission, and on 29 August 2026 carris.pt printed no reopening date for any of the four. Replacement buses 51E, 22B and 19B run the three funicular routes on ordinary card fares, and the Santa Justa walkway from Largo do Carmo to the lift's upper platform is closed with it. Press reports in March 2026 said the Graça funicular was approved to reopen in April 2026; Carris had not confirmed it on any page we read, so we do not print it as open.

The funiculars page tracks the status and the Santa Justa lift page the walking alternative up Rua do Carmo. The 2026 tariff still lists €4.30 for two funicular rides and €6.20 for the lift, which tells you Carris expects them back, not when.

CP's suburban lines are the day-trip transport and the €11.40 24-hour ticket covers them; Transtejo's ferries and Fertagus's bridge trains are separate operators with their own fares on the same card. Figures from the CP, Transtejo and Fertagus tariff pages and PDFs read on 29 August 2026.

CP does not state journey times or frequencies for Sintra and Cascais on the pages we read, and Rede Expressos, the coach company for Fátima, Nazaré and Óbidos, returned a 403 to us and prints only 'from €2.95' on its homepage. The Sintra, Cascais, Évora and Porto pages carry what each official site would give us, and the day trips index compares them with the tours. For Cristo Rei the usual route is the Cacilhas ferry and a local bus up the hill; the bus number and fare are not on any official page we could read, and fertagus.pt does not describe a Cristo Rei route, so ask at the pier.

Portuguese law requires at least five working days' notice of a strike, ten where minimum services apply, and transport is a minimum-services sector; notices are filed with DGERT and posted by the operators, metrolisboa.pt under its strike tag, carris.pt under service changes, cp.pt as minimum-services documents. On 29 August 2026 the metro's archive showed no strike announced for September or October, the latest being 9 and 14 April 2026; in the June 2026 general strike CP, Carris and Transtejo ran minimum services and the metro did not. The strikes page explains how to read a notice and what to do on the day.

The do's and don'ts of the day: validate every time, including the tap-out on the metro; keep the card, because inspectors ask for it and the fine for no ticket is not printed on the English pages we read; do not carry cash for the tram and expect to board; do not stand at Martim Moniz at 11:00 for tram 28; and do not plan a journey after 01:00 without the night-bus map or a transfer. Pickpockets work the crowded trams and the Baixa-Chiado escalators; the safety page has the pattern.

Metro de Lisboa's pages describe lifts at most central stations, and the articulated trams and modern buses are low-floor; the historic trams on routes 28, 12 and 24 have steps and no ramp, and the funiculars, which used to be the step-free way up two hills, are closed. Baixa-Chiado has escalators and lifts between its two levels, which is the flat way from the grid to Chiado. Beyond that, the operators' English pages do not publish a per-station accessibility list we could cite, and the accessibility page works through the hills route by route instead.