Estação Elevatória dos Barbadinhos: A Cathedral of Steam
Why is it significant?
Catch your breath after the climb and look at the brick and stone building in front of you, with its tall chimney and big arched windows. It could pass for a chapel or a railway station. Inside, instead of saints, it keeps four gigantic steam engines.
Key Facts
| Place | Estação Elevatória dos Barbadinhos: A Cathedral of Steam |
|---|---|
| Address | Rua do Alviela 12, 1170-012 Lisboa, Portugal |
| Geo Coordinates | 38.71990, -9.12000 |
| Part of Walk | Lisbon in Blue and White: Graça, São Vicente & the Azulejo Trail |
| Generated | Generated |
Catch your breath after the climb and look at the brick and stone building in front of you, with its tall chimney and big arched windows. It could pass for a chapel or a railway station. Inside, instead of saints, it keeps four gigantic steam engines.
By the late nineteenth century, the old Águas Livres aqueduct could no longer quench a growing Lisbon. So the city brought water from the Alviela springs, more than a hundred kilometres away, through a new canal that opened in 1880. The water reached a reservoir here on the Barbadinhos hill, but much of the city stood higher still, so something had to push it further uphill. That something was this station, the Estação Elevatória a Vapor dos Barbadinhos.
The engines are beautiful in a way only Victorian machines can be: polished metal, decorative cast ironwork, huge flywheels and beams that once rocked slowly up and down, day and night, while stokers shovelled coal into the boilers. They worked until the late 1920s, when electric pumps replaced them, and they have been kept as part of the Water Museum.
It is worth thinking about this place on a walk about art. The people who designed these engines and halls wanted them to be admired, not hidden, and the same age that built them covered Lisbon's new apartment blocks in factory-made tiles. Industry and decoration were not enemies then. A pump could have a column, and a cheap tile could have a flower on it.
The name Barbadinhos, the little bearded ones, comes from the Italian Capuchin friars, famous for their beards, who once had a convent on this hill. From here, walk east along the slope for just a few minutes, to a long convent façade that looks down over the river.