About this journey

Lisboa - Santa Apolónia, sitting on the northern bank of the Tagus, is the oldest railway terminus in Portugal, inaugurated on 1 May 1865. The station's great nave — a lattice of wrought iron and glass approximately 117 metres long — was the endpoint of a rail ambition dating to 1844, when the first project to link Lisbon with Spain was conceived. In its early decades the station served as an intermodal hub, known as the Cais da América, where passengers transferred from trains to ships bound for the Americas.

The line departing Santa Apolónia is the Linha do Norte, Portugal's primary rail corridor connecting Lisbon and Porto across 336 km. North of the city the track follows the Tagus for much of its first hundred kilometres, passing through Vila Franca de Xira and Santarém before the river bends east toward Spain at Entroncamento, a major junction serving branch lines toward Badajoz and Salamanca. Beyond Entroncamento the route climbs gently through the Ribatejo and Beira Litoral interior, threading tunnels near Chão de Maçãs and descending to Coimbra-B — the main rail stop for a city whose university dates to 1290. After Coimbra the line opens onto a longer high-speed stretch through Aveiro, whose lagoon-threaded setting has earned it the name "Venice of Portugal", and then traces the Atlantic coastal margin through Espinho and Gaia.

The journey ends at Porto - Campanhã, inaugurated on 4 November 1877 alongside the Ponte D. Maria Pia, whose layout was set in 1872 by engineers including Alexandre Eiffel. Arriving across the São João Bridge over the Douro, the train moves from an open coastal landscape into the dense railway node that handles all CP services for Portugal's second city — a fitting close to a route that spans the full length of the country's 19th-century rail backbone.