The Ponte das Barcas: Porto's Bridge of Boats and the Day It Went Down

A crossing that came and went with the river

For most of its history Porto had no bridge at all. The Douro between the city and Vila Nova de Gaia was crossed by boat and raft, and from 1744 by a regular passenger service, on a river that runs fast and floods hard. When an army or a festival needed a solid crossing, a temporary bridge of boats was assembled and then taken away again; the English Wikipedia article on the disaster traces references to such improvised crossings back to the chronicler Fernão Lopes, writing of an army of King Ferdinand I in the fourteenth century.

What changed in 1806 was permanence. A pontoon bridge designed as such was inaugurated on 15 August 1806, the work of Carlos Amarante, an architect and engineer whose churches stand in both Porto and Braga. The Portuguese Wikipedia entry describes twenty barges linked by cables and a deck about 200 metres long. The English article, quoting the University of Porto engineering professor Manuel de Azeredo, places it a few metres downstream of the present Luís I bridge and quotes a nineteenth-century description praising the way it 'rose and fell with the tides, could be opened and closed to allow passage of large river traffic, and finally could be dismantled and re-established when the vicissitudes of the river demanded it.'

The detail that mattered on the day

That last virtue is the one to hold on to. The bridge was designed to be opened in the middle so that river traffic could pass — the rabelo boats that brought wine down from the Douro could not have worked otherwise. A crossing built to be interrupted is a crossing with a gap in it, and on 29 March 1809 the gap is at the centre of every account of what went wrong.

It is worth being clear about scale, too. Twenty boats and 200 metres is a narrow, low, flexible structure with railings and a plank roadway, at the mercy of the tide beneath it. It was designed for carts, animals and ordinary foot traffic moving at a walk in both directions. It was not designed for a city.

The English Wikipedia article states plainly that the causes are unclear and disputed, and the explanations it collects are not mutually exclusive.

Weight. The simplest account is that a structure sized for carts took the mass of a fleeing city, and that the deaths came principally from the partial collapse of the deck and the falls that followed. Twenty linked boats have no redundancy: once one goes down at one end of a hinge, the roadway above it does too.

The open span. The second account is that Portuguese soldiers opened the central section — the part built to open for river traffic — and that the crowd behind kept pushing people into a gap they could not see until they were in it. Whether this was done to stop the French, in panic, or not at all is exactly what is not resolved; it is the version that most Portuguese retellings emphasise.

The guns and the horses. The third is not a cause of the collapse but of the death toll. Portuguese cavalry forced back to the riverside cut a path through the crowd with their swords, and people were trampled under the horses. Artillery was firing from the Serra do Pilar battery on the Gaia bank towards the French on the Porto side; the sources say those Portuguese gunners killed more of their own civilians than enemy soldiers. French guns were firing from the Porto bank as well, though the English article flags that claim as needing a better source than it has.

One further version circulates widely in guidebooks and on plaques of the memory-tourism kind: that the Bishop of Porto, who had already withdrawn to the Gaia side, ordered the bridge raised and shelled behind him. The bishop's prior retreat is in the sources; the order is not one we could find in the academic or encyclopaedic accounts, and it belongs in the category of things the city has always believed rather than things that are established.

The Alminhas da Ponte, Cais da Ribeira

The memorial is easy to walk past, which is part of its character: a bronze relief set into the quay wall under a small iron canopy, with a shelf beside it for candles. It was made in 1897 by José Joaquim Teixeira Lopes — Teixeira Lopes the elder, father of the better-known sculptor — and it replaced an earlier shrine on the same spot that had held a painting of the disaster. The city tourism board lists it at Cais da Ribeira, postcode 4050-509, with no opening hours and no price, because it is a piece of street furniture that happens to be a war grave marker. Porto's heritage department describes it as one of the more unusual neoclassical works in the city; the candles and flowers left there are not a tourist ritual but a local one.

The name means 'the little souls of the bridge' — alminhas are the roadside soul-shrines found all over northern Portugal, where passers-by pray for souls in purgatory. Putting one on the quay was a way of making the river itself the grave.

São José das Taipas, and the painting

The victims' remains were interred at the church of São José das Taipas, in the Vitória quarter above the river — a building by Carlos Amarante, the same man who designed the bridge. On its Altar of Souls hangs a painting of the disaster in oils on copper; the English Wikipedia article attributes it to António da Cunha, while the Portuguese entry dates a work of this subject there to 1845, and the painting has its own scholarly literature, including a 2009 study by Foteini Vlachou on how the event was pictured in Portugal and in France. The church keeps parish hours rather than visitor hours, so treat it as a stop you may find closed; the churches hub has the ones that reliably open.

The bicentenary markers, and the column at Boavista

On 29 March 2009, the two-hundredth anniversary, President Aníbal Cavaco Silva inaugurated a sculpture of steel elements marking the points on each bank where the bridge's cables were anchored — a quiet piece of work that only makes sense once you know what you are looking at, which is the best argument for reading this page before you walk the quay.

The grander monument is inland and rarely connected to the story by visitors: the 45-metre column in the middle of the Boavista roundabout, the Monumento aos Heróis da Guerra Peninsular, begun in 1909 and finished in 1951 to designs by the Porto architect José Marques da Silva with the sculptor Alves de Sousa. A lion — the Anglo-Portuguese alliance — stands over a fallen French eagle at the top, and around the base, among the soldiers, are the civilians of the bridge.

The bridges that came after

The pontoons were never replaced in kind. On 17 February 1843, without ceremony, a suspension bridge opened on the site: the Ponte Pênsil D. Maria II, 170.14 metres of deck and 6 metres wide on eight iron cables slung between stone pillars 18 metres tall, according to the Portuguese Wikipedia entry. It served about 45 years, and was dismantled in 1887 once the Luís I bridge opened.

Its two stone pillars still stand on the Porto bank beside the modern bridge, along with the ruins of a guardhouse, and they are the reason the quay reads as a palimpsest: boats, then cables, then Eiffel-school iron, all on the same hundred metres of water. The Luís I bridge page covers the crossing that ended the sequence.

Start on the terrace beside the cathedral, where you can see the whole reach of the river the battle was fought over — the Sé's own ticket is $3.49 (€3) for cloister, museum and tower, open to 18:30 from April to October and 17:30 from November to March, though the terrace outside costs nothing. Walk down through the lanes to the Ribeira quay and find the Alminhas at river level, downstream of the bridge; give it a minute, because the point of it is that nobody does.

Cross the lower deck of the Luís I bridge on foot to the Gaia side — ten minutes, free — and look back at where the boats were moored, roughly under the modern arch. Then climb, or take the cable car at $8.14 (€7) one way and $11.62 (€10) return, running from 10:00 to 20:00 between late April and late September, to the Serra do Pilar terrace, where the Portuguese battery stood. The monastery itself is closed for restoration with no reopening date published, but the terrace is the viewpoint, and it is the one place where the geography of 29 March 1809 explains itself: the city on the far bank, the drop to the water, the narrow crossing between them.

Done slowly with a coffee, that is about 2 kilometres, ninety minutes and roughly $4, and it is the best free history walk in Porto. The free things to do page has the rest of them.