Águas Livres Aqueduct (Aqueduto das Águas Livres)

On top of the Águas Livres Aqueduct

Once through the gate you’re out on the arcade, 941 metres and 35 arches over the valley. The biggest is the Great Arch, about 65 metres high and almost 29 wide.

Visitors describe a walk of about a kilometre, out along one side of the arcade and back along the other, some of it 65 metres up.

In the last couple of years they’ve had the arches almost to themselves, one with “no one around except for a bored guard”. It can be windy up there, and one summed up the height as “high but not scary”.

The gate is at Calçada da Quintinha 6, in Campolide, by a small park with a little exhibition and information panels, and visitors say it’s hard to spot. The visit is run by the Água Museum, EPAL’s water museum, so don’t confuse it with the museum’s Barbadinhos site, across town.

Águas Livres Aqueduct tickets and opening hours

The self-guided walk costs €4, and students and over-65s pay half. Under-18s go in free, and so does anyone with reduced mobility, with one companion.

Everyone gets in free on the first Sunday of the month, and on 22 March (World Water Day), 18 April, 18 May, 5 June and 1 October. EPAL’s timetable page adds 1 June.

Holders of the Lisboa Card (€31 for 24 hours) pay half here, and the Carris buses out to Campolide, the 742, 751 and 758, come with the card.

Reviewers say you buy the ticket at the entrance. Don’t leave it late, though: one visitor who arrived before 17:00 in 2022 found it already shut.

Guided visits of the arches cost €6, double on Sundays and holidays, and have to be booked ahead. The O Aqueduto de Lisboa tour needs at least 10 people, so it isn’t one you can book for two.

King João V’s Águas Livres Aqueduct and the Diogo Alves legend

King João V, Portugal’s king at the time, had the aqueduct built to bring the city water, and the work ran from 1731 to 1799. It was still going on when the 1755 earthquake destroyed much of Lisbon, and the aqueduct withstood it.

By the middle of the 19th century the whole system ran to about 58 km, with a main line of 14 km, and it supplied Lisbon until the 1960s.

The arches also come with a darker story. Diogo Alves, a murderer executed in 1841, is said to have thrown his victims off the top.

Sources disagree on when the walk across was closed to the public, and on whether he was the reason. The Água Museum has run a themed visit about him, to sort fact from legend.

The Mãe d’Água, the Águas Livres Aqueduct’s city reservoir

The reservoir is a separate visit, in Amoreiras, run by the same Água Museum, with its own ticket at the same price and card discount.

This is where the aqueduct’s water reached the city. The architect Carlos Mardel designed it and died in 1763 with it unfinished. Another architect, Reinaldo Manuel dos Santos, took over in 1771, and the roof only went on in 1834.

Inside, water falls into a tank 7.5 metres deep, built to hold 5,500 cubic metres, with four stone columns rising from it. A terrace on top looks out over the city.

The same complex houses the Immersivus Gallery, a show of immersive projections run by another company, with 15% off for Lisboa Card holders.