Lisbon’s old trams, especially the 28E, run from Martim Moniz through Alfama, Baixa, and Estrela in yellow Remodelado cars from the 1930s. You tap a zapping card or buy a ticket from the driver if the machine is kind. The 28 is famous because it climbs streets that were not designed for buses. It is also a commute. Between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. it is a carriage of backpacks at walking speed. Early, or a short hop from Graça to the cathedral, is still a tram.
How a hillside city kept its rails
Lisbon electrified trams in 1901. The network shrank as cars took the lower town, but the hills kept the 28 and a few others because the gradient and the corners defeated ordinary buses. The Remodelado fleet is rebuilt wood and brass on undercarriages that can take the tightest turn at Praça da Figueira. Carris, the municipal operator, runs them as transit with a souvenir problem. Tram 15 to Belém is a different, longer, more modern car; do not confuse it with the 28 because photographs do.
Pickpockets work the 28 because tourists work the 28. That sentence is older than your guidebook. The line is still the best way to see how the city folds: a sudden view of the river, a church wall in the window, then a stop you did not know was a stop.
Why the yellow car is a destination
People come because it is the moving version of Alfama, because the hills photograph through a wooden window, and because every film about Lisbon puts a tram in the second shot. It is popular in a way that means you may wait for three cars at Martim Moniz and board none. The 12E does a shorter Alfama loop and is sometimes kinder. Walking the same streets is slower and, in the middle of the day, more honest.
The Eiffel-designed Santa Justa lift and the funiculars (Bica, Glória, Lavra) are the rest of the same 19th-century idea: machines for a city that goes up. Ride one of those if the 28 is a sardine tin.
If you go
Ride two or three stops at 8 a.m., then get off and walk. Do not treat the full 28 as a sightseeing tour you have to finish. Watch your bag. Do not stack a packed 28 with a same-morning Belém run on the 15 unless you like rails more than Lisbon. The view from Miradouro da Senhora do Monte is the still version of what the tram keeps flashing.
