Entroncamento

Railway city par excellence, it owes its name to the fact that two railway lines meet there: Northern Line (which connects Lisbon to Porto), and the Beira Baixa Line (which connects Entroncamento to Guarda).

The National Railway Museum, the main ex-libris of the city, is in the Entroncamento Railway Complex, in an area of 4.5 hectares. The permanent exhibition inhabits notable railway buildings. Get to know true national treasures, fantastic machines that have trodden the paths of history and rail transport and visit the temporary exhibitions. Experience the augmented reality totem. Take a walk on the manned model circuit or drive an ATV on the Museum's lines!

It is the seat of the second smallest municipality in the country, in terms of land area, with an area of 13,73 km2.

The municipality is crossed by the Ribeira (stream) de Santa Catarina, although most of the course within the city is underground and by the Ribeira de Árgea, which crosses the the northern zone of the municipality and feeds the artificial reservoir of Parque Verde do Bonito. The water from all these streams will then feed the Tagus River, which is located to the southeast, about 1.5 km away from the county boundary.

The Railway, with the construction of kilometres and kilometres of tracks, was the great employer of the second half of the 19th century, giving rise to a new professional class, the railroad worker. The concentration of workers was strongest in the towns along the railway network, which welcomed peasants and craftsmen displaced from their lands of origin and now destined for the construction of railway lines, driving trains, and maintaining material.

Like what occurred abroad, mainly in England and France, houses were built for railway workers, modelled on some models.

In Entroncamento, none of the first housing units built were intended for workers, although the designation of working-class neighbourhoods is used by Cottinelli Telmo and Luís da Cunha, when they wrote, about Bairro Camões, in the Arquitectura magazine, the article “Workers’ neighbourhoods and school constructions ”.

There are six housing areas for railway employees in Entroncamento. With a neighbourhood character there are three: Bairro do Boneco, Vila Verde and Bairro Camões.

The first sets of houses for company employees appeared next to the station, on Rua Latino Coelho, on either side of the entrance to the stations.

In the absence of any documents, it has not yet been possible to date these buildings, although written information that was conveyed orally has reached us, so we will advance, in this field, only by hypotheses. The oldest railway workers in Entroncamento believe that they were erected in the early days of the railways. A possible hypothesis is that of 1882, since it was around that time that the Italian builder Paolo Zozzi started building on behalf of the Royal Company of Railways. The first Camões School was completed in 1882.

But Entroncamento, which was initially just a Parish Council and became a Municipality in 1945, has much more to see than trains and railways.

Its cultural heritage includes, among others:

The city also has several green spaces, including: