It’s often only when something breaks that you learn how it works. Occasionally, I use the funiculars dotted around Lisbon to quickly navigate steep, sweat-inducing hills. They don’t feel dangerous; a touch precarious, perhaps, but only because the fin-de-siecle contraptions, with their angular poise against the steep inclines and narrow wooden benches, seem so unlikely. But I hadn’t thought about how they actually function until the tragic accident at the Elevador da Glória last week: two carriages at either end of the climb, connected under the track by a haulage wire in perfect balance, provide a counterweight to propel each other, with the help of an electric cable overhead.

Last Wednesday evening, during rush hour, a cable connecting two of those carriages reportedly disconnected, causing the higher one to careen downhill, derailing and crashing into a nearby building at high speed. Sixteen people were killed with 20 more injured; five are still in a critical condition.

According to preliminary observations by Portuguese officials, the funicular’s scheduled maintenance plan was up to date and no anomalies had been discovered in the cable or braking systems before the crash. But two separate investigations remain under way. There also continues to be much debate about underlying issues at play, all of which is feeding into the city and its discontents.

An early line from Público newspaper – “Cable breakage exposes fragile maintenance of Lisbon elevator ‘overloaded’ with tourists” – made me think about how much of the global coverage of the incident talked about the funicular only as a tourist attraction. Some of this is natural given that the victims included people from the US to South Korea. But five Portuguese people also died: the........

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