25 de Abril Bridge and Pilar 7

Landmark · AlcântaraLisbon,Portugal

A red steel suspension bridge over the Tagus that lost a dictator's name overnight in 1974, with one pier open to climb eighty metres up.

The 25 de Abril Bridge is a steel suspension bridge with a main span of just over a thousand metres, painted the same red as the one in San Francisco. One of its piers has been open to visitors since 2017. You go up inside the concrete, twenty-six floors of it, to a walkway and a glass floor eighty metres above the water. Below, the docks that made this stretch of river work are still there. Lisbon and Almada face each other across two kilometres of water, and until 1966 the only way over was by boat. The bridge carried a dictator's name for its first eight years and lost it on the night of 25 April 1974. A second deck was hung underneath in 1999, so trains run below the traffic. The crossing turned Almada, on the far side, from a place you took a boat to into a suburb.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Pilar 7 is at ground level under the bridge — the entrance is beneath the north pier on the Alcântara side rather than at the toll plaza, and drivers regularly go over the bridge looking for it.
The glass floor is the whole point, and it is hard going if you dislike heights — the platform stands eighty metres above the water with the road deck directly overhead.
The panoramic lift has been out of service for years — the way up is the stairs inside the pier instead, so check the day before you go rather than counting on the ride.

Things to do

1
Stand on the glass over the water
Climb up inside the pier and walk out to the platform. The floor is glass, the Tagus is eighty metres below it, and the road deck is directly overhead. When a train crosses on the deck beneath the traffic, the whole structure shivers and you feel it through your feet.
2
Look up at it from the marina
Walk to Doca de Santo Amaro, under the north end. The bridge lifts straight out of the water beside the moored boats, and the red steel fills the sky above the masts. From down here the whole span reads at once, which it never does from the deck itself.
3
Look upstream at the container port
From the platform or the dock, look upstream at the container cranes at Alcântara. This is the part of the Tagus that still loads and unloads cargo, a few kilometres from the monuments that celebrate the old voyages. Seeing the working port and the monuments in one afternoon shows both sides of the city's relationship with its river.