Carris: The Buses of Lisbon’s Municipal Transport System in the 1980s

Companhia Carris de Ferro de Lisboa, known as Carris, was formed in 1872 and has been operating the municipal transport in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon ever since. Starting with horse-drawn and cable-car trams, these were gradually replaced by electric trams in the early twentieth century.

Lisbon is a hilly city with narrow cobbled streets that twist and turn and the tramway system was built to serve these torturous thoroughfares. Trams reigned supreme for almost seventy-five years before buses were introduced which were almost universally of British origin. The authority amassed a large fleet of single- and double-deck AEC types which mirrored their UK counterparts and were mainly used to expand services to the new suburbs.

The British influence waned in the early 1970s and from 1975 the authority invested in a large fleet of Iveco, Scania and Volvo single-deckers to replace their ageing fleet of Regals and Regents. During the 1960s Carris also embarked on a comprehensive programme of bus rebuilding which included the conversion of fifty single-deck types to double-deck types to increase their passenger-carrying capacity. In 1972 Carris was operating a fleet of 560 buses out of three garages which had increased in size to 724 by 2021. In addition to buses and trams, Carris also operated a public lift and three hill-climbing funicular railways, all of which were still in use in 2024.

With fascinating images, Mike Rhodes documents Carris buses during the 1980s.