Ponte 25 de Abril

It was built by the Americans: United States Steel was the prime contractor and Morrison-Knudsen, the Idaho firm that had worked on the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, its partner; the design was by Steinman, Boynton, Gronquist and London of New York. That is why it looks like San Francisco — the paint is the Golden Gate's International Orange, the truss is the Bay Bridge's — and why the Golden Gate comparison in every search is half right: it is the Bay Bridge's builders and the Golden Gate's colour. Construction began on 5 November 1962 and the bridge opened on 6 August 1966, six months early, with the longest main span in continental Europe at the time.

It opened with four lanes and the name of the dictator who ordered it. Days after the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974 the brass letters spelling SALAZAR were taken off the pillar on film and the new name painted on; it has been the Ponte 25 de Abril since. A fifth reversible lane came in 1990, six lanes in 1998, and on 30 June 1999 the lower deck that had been in the original design but cut for cost finally opened as a double-track railway, after a second set of main cables was added above the first and the towers were raised.

The tourist board, Turismo de Lisboa, runs an interpretation centre inside and around the seventh pillar on the Lisbon bank, at Avenida da Índia in Alcântara, opened in 2017. The ticket buys an interactive route through the pillar's outside and inside — the anchorage, the cables, the maintenance galleries — with multimedia on the build, a virtual-reality piece on the parts of the bridge you cannot reach, a photo booth, and the point of it all: a glass-floored viewpoint up at deck level, with the traffic a few metres away and the river beneath your shoes.

The catch on 29 August 2026: the page carries the notice 'Lift under repair', and the shop sells the experience at €3 instead of €3.70 because the viewpoint is reached only by the stairs — 372 of them, per the tourist board. No reopening date is printed. Anyone who cannot do 372 steps gets the ground-level exhibition and the VR for the same €3, and should probably not buy it.

Hours are 10:00–18:00 daily, last entry 17:00, closed 25 December. The ticket is on the visitlisboa.com shop and at the door; Lisboa Card holders and under-5s are free, and the shop lists child, student and senior tiers without printing the amounts on the page we read. There is an Ask Me Lisboa tourist office at Pilar 7 itself, which is where the Lisboa Card can be collected on this side of town.

• Get there: tram 15E or buses 714, 727, 732 and 751 to Alcântara; the Cascais-line train to Alcântara-Mar; parking at the Congress Centre — all per the Pilar 7 page
• Time: 40 minutes with the stairs; the Belém sights are two tram stops on
• Verdict: at €3 with the Lisboa Card free, worth the detour on a Belém day; not worth a special trip while the lift is out

The bridge is 2.3 kilometres long and red, so it is visible from half the city; the question is where it composes. Side-on with the city behind it, only from the south bank. Under it, only from the water.

Along it, from Pilar 7 and from the Alcântara and Belém riverside, where the towers stack up against the sunset.

Our pick: Cristo Rei in the last two hours of light for the photograph, and the free Alcântara riverside under the deck for the sound — the trains on the lower deck make the whole structure hum, which is the thing Pilar 7's VR cannot give you.

By train. Fertagus runs over the lower deck from Lisbon (Roma-Areeiro, Entrecampos, Sete Rios, Campolide) to Pragal, Almada and on to Setúbal; the 1 January 2026 tariff prints €1.90 single to Pragal and €5.70 to Setúbal. It is the cheapest and quickest crossing, it puts you a 20-minute uphill walk from Cristo Rei, and it is not included in the €11.40 Carris/Metro/CP 24-hour pass, which names CP, not Fertagus.

By car. Six lanes, toll northbound only since 1993 at the plaza on the Almada side, run by the Lusoponte concession from 1996; the amount was not on a page we read, and Lusoponte publishes it. Traffic has run at capacity since the 1970s and a third Tagus crossing was put back on the government's list in May 2024 as part of the Lisbon–Madrid high-speed line, due 2034.

On foot or by bike. Not allowed, ever, except on the day of the Lisbon half marathon each year, which starts on the south bank, crosses the bridge and finishes in Belém. That is the one legal walk over the Ponte 25 de Abril, and entering the race is the ticket. The ferry to Cacilhas is what everyone else does, and the Cristo Rei page has its fares and last sailings.

It fits in the Belém day, not on its own: tram 15E from Praça da Figueira, off at Alcântara for Pilar 7 at 10:00 opening, along the river past the MAAT to Jerónimos by noon, the tower and the pastéis in the afternoon. With the Lisboa Card the tram and Pilar 7 are both covered. The bridge is the backdrop to the whole day, and the sunset from the Belém waterfront looks straight back at it.

The other bridge day is the south-bank one: ferry to Cacilhas, Cristo Rei for the side-on view, the ferry back under the bridge's shadow. The three-day itinerary runs Belém on day two and the south bank on day three; the things to do hub puts the bridge where it belongs, as the thing you see from everywhere else.