Porto Tram Museum (Museu do Carro Eléctrico)

Old trams and the machine room at the Porto Tram Museum

The building deserves a look before the trams. The engineer Luís Couto dos Santos designed the power station on the model of French factories, with two great halls and a chimney. It ran on coal from the mines of São Pedro da Cova, east of Porto, and on water from the river.

Those halls now hold the trams. Around the 28 vehicles, the collection takes in uniforms, old tickets and photographs.

Porto’s old trams

At least one of the trams is left open, so you can climb aboard. The others stay closed to protect them.

Car no. 8 is an americano, the type of horse-drawn tram that opened Porto’s first line in 1872. Look out, too, for nos. 18 and 267, the fumistas, a type of smokers’ car.

Two of the trams, nos. 100 and 104, are replicas built in the 1990s.

The machine room

Then there’s the power station’s own machinery. In the machine room, the old Swiss and German machines stand in a row in front of the control panel, a wall of dials and switches.

Porto Tram Museum tickets, family rates and free days

Adults pay €8, and young people from 6 to 18, students and over-65s pay €4. A family ticket, for one adult with one child or teenager, costs the same as a single adult; each extra adult pays €5 and each extra child €3.

Hang on to your tram ticket, too. A single ticket bought on board takes 30% off the entry.

No Porto pass covers the museum and there’s nothing to book: you pay at the desk when you arrive.

Entry is free for everyone on three days a year. One is the first Saturday in May, when part of the collection takes to the riverside in a parade. The others are 18 May, International Museum Day, and a Saturday or Sunday in December, for its Entrelinhas event.

On any day, entry is free for visitors with a disability, the companion of a visitor with reduced mobility or who is blind, teachers, journalists and museum staff. The museum also keeps two free entries a day for unemployed visitors.

In summer there’s a night visit too: once a month from May to September, the museum runs an evening tour that ends with a tram ride at dusk. Ask the museum for the price and how to book.

Allow about an hour, as the city’s tourist office does. The displays’ information comes in seven languages on Zoomguide, to read or to listen to. Photos are fine without flash, and there’s no café for now, nor any eating inside.

How the Massarelos power station became the Porto Tram Museum

The station was finished in 1911 and was running at full power by 1915. From 1955 the trams’ power came instead from the grid of the União Eléctrica Portuguesa, a power company, and in 1960 the station was reduced to a substation.

The museum opened inside it on 18 May 1992, International Museum Day.

From the Porto Tram Museum to the Crystal Palace gardens

The museum is on the riverside road in Massarelos, between the old town and Foz, where the Douro meets the sea. The easy way there is the historic tram: line 1 from Infante, by São Francisco church, or line 18 from Carmo, by the Clérigos Tower. Line 1 runs about every 20 minutes.

Buses 403, 500 and 900 stop outside, at Museu do Carro Eléctrico, and from Casa da Música metro station it’s 23 minutes’ walk down Rua D. Pedro V.