The Lisboa Brief, Week of 5 September 2026: The Glória Comes Back as a New Machine in 2029, the Airport Broke Its Night Ceiling in 33 Weeks of 35, and Dona Estefânia's Nine Team Chiefs Resign
Your weekly roundup from the capital: Carris settles what replaces the Elevador da Glória and when, ZERO counts Lisbon's airport past its night-flight ceiling in 33 weeks of 35, FlixBus still cannot sell a ticket from Sete Rios, and every team chief at Dona Estefânia's children's emergency resigns.
Carris has decided what replaces the Elevador da Glória, and it is not the machine that went down the hill. Elsewhere: the airport passed its night-flight ceiling in 33 weeks out of 35, FlixBus still cannot sell a ticket out of Sete Rios, a law firm says EMEL has been fining drivers outside its own zones, and every team chief at Dona Estefânia's children's emergency has resigned.
A New Machine on a Historic Hill
Carris presented the replacement on Monday afternoon at the Ordem dos Engenheiros, three days before the first anniversary of the derailment that killed sixteen people. The first of its five guiding principles settles the question that has hung over the Calçada all year: this will be a new installation, not a reconstruction.
Rui Lopo, president since January, put it in regulatory terms. The accident destroyed the working cabin, so the equipment can no longer sit inside the European exception covering historic installations unmodified since 1 January 1986. Passengers will notice: the new cabin will be similar in shape but will not be made of wood, and it will carry passengers with reduced mobility.
The tender goes out in the first quarter of 2027 and, if that holds, the ascensor opens in the first half of 2029. The main threat to the date is archaeology rather than procurement. "You never know what you are going to find when you lift the whole structure," Lopo said. "The ascensor will be new. The place will stay historic."
Nights, Terminals and Fines
Portaria n.º 303-A/2004 caps traffic at Humberto Delgado between midnight and six at 91 movements a week and 26 a night. ZERO published a count on Friday, and a public page at aerovoos.zero.ong to keep it running. The weekly ceiling was passed in 33 of this year's 35 weeks, by 1,465 movements in all; the week of 17 to 23 August ran to 187. The hard curfew announced in March 2025 is still not in force, and 1,165 of this year's night movements fell inside those four hours. In the same week the regulator approved new security-screening and baggage indicators for the five ANA airports, which cannot penalise anyone until January 2028.
At Sete Rios, six months after a Lisbon court ordered that it be given immediate access, FlixBus has gone back to the judge, filing an enforcement action against Rede Expressos and a criminal complaint against the terminal's managers. An access date of 20 August slipped, 24 September is now pencilled in, and there is still not a single journey on sale.
A Lisbon law firm with more than a thousand files behind it will file against EMEL this month, arguing that the company has issued notices outside its own zones and hours, closed written defences by email, and pursued cases that had already prescribed. EMEL says it inspects the whole municipality by delegation and does not itself decide traffic proceedings. It did not rule out refunds. Drivers paid it 5.71 million euros last year.
Nine Letters From Dona Estefânia
At 21:53 on Thursday night, the Unidade Local de Saúde de São José received a letter signed by all nine team chiefs of the paediatric emergency department at Hospital Dona Estefânia. They are not leaving and they are not on strike: what they are giving up is the coordination of a rota they say they cannot make safe. The cause is anaesthesiology. The group has 83 anaesthetists for seven hospitals, three external emergency departments and all its surgical activity, and is a designated shortage area for the specialty.
The letter landed on the day the SNS executive published figures pointing the other way: 204 emergency-department closure days in the first half of 2026 against 636 a year earlier, paediatric closures down from 122 days to 14. Closure days count the service that fails outright. They say nothing about a rota held together by transfers and overtime.
Across the Estuary
Almada lifted its water alert at the end of Monday, closing fifty-four days of overnight cut-offs on the Caparica coast with reservoirs back above 70 percent. In Cascais, a fertility clinic closed from one day to the next, declared insolvent on 25 August; the regulator found out two days later from the insolvency administrator, and 220 gametes and embryos are moving to another Lisbon clinic. And several hundred people laid beach towels across Setúbal's Praça do Bocage, the fourth protest against a private estate's civil actions asking a court to declare five real beaches its own.
In the Courts
Two civil actions were distributed on Monday to the Juízo Central Cível de Lisboa, and between them Crédit Agricole and its life insurer ask Ricardo Salgado, Amílcar Morais Pires and Rioforte for just over a billion euros: 855 million from the bank, 152.8 million from the insurer. Separately, a Lisbon administrative court refused José Sócrates's injunction against his court-appointed defender, so the Marquês trial keeps him until Sócrates instructs a lawyer of his own.
Also Around the Region
Six people live in the disused Escola Industrial Afonso Domingues in Marvila, which hosts the Festival Iminente from 17 to 20 September; the organisers have offered them a room in a holiday rental for the four nights. Central government ceded the building to the council in 2022 for housing. The council ceded it to the festival until 2027.
The PSP's Lisbon investigators made 739 arrests for dealing in the centre between January 2024 and mid-August, 316 of them in the Mouraria and 114 in the Baixa. "Once arrested, people are replaced in the crime," said the officer who runs the unit. And Nova, still without a confirmed rector, agreed joint nanotechnology programmes with a Macau university, the first Chinese students due in Lisbon in 2027.
On in Lisbon
Festas na Rua runs to 4 October. Festa na Praça returns next Saturday, 12 September, after a decade away, with NAPA, Mariza and a DJ set from Kiko is Hot. On the same weekend Cinema no Estendal takes the steps at the Mercado do Forno do Tijolo with a programme of queer shorts, and the following one the festival moves to the Jardim Keil do Amaral in Monsanto for sunset sets on 18 and 19 September. The Feira da Luz continues daily in Carnide until 27 September.
That is the capital's week. The Lisboa Brief returns next Saturday.
Feature image: car number 2 of the Elevador da Glória climbing the Calçada da Glória in June 2025, three months before the derailment, by Jakub Hałun (CC BY 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
