The starting line in the 19th century

The history of the railway in the Alentejo began to take concrete shape with the opening of the section between Casa Branca and Évora on September 14, 1863, an infrastructure integrated into the 19th-century strategy of approaching Spain promoted by the Companhia Real dos Caminhos de Ferro Portugueses. This initial network expanded until it consolidated the Alentejo Line, whose structural operational configuration between Barreiro and Beja reached a total length of 217.6 kilometers, as recorded in data from Infraestruturas de Portugal in 2026. For those living in the municipalities of the Alentejo interior, these axes represented the main route for flowing products and circulating people toward the capital, shaping the demographic and economic development of several generations.

Throughout the 20th century, the operation of these lines underwent successive legislative and technical adaptations, culminating in the formal restructuring carried out by Decree-Law No. 140/92 of June 20, 1992, issued by the Diário da República. This diploma definitively delimited the operational contours of the Alentejo Line and the South Line, defining speed profiles and stops that remained in force for years. Compared to the national scale of the time, the Portuguese railway network already registered stagnant growth in useful kilometers of track, contrasting sharply with the strong expansion of the road network that loomed for the following decades across the entire mainland territory.

Despite the longevity of these infrastructures, the Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos pointed out in a Pordata report from 2025 that almost 30 percent of train lines in Portugal have been deactivated over recent decades. This progressive closure severely affected territorial cohesion in the interior, disrupting historical connections between neighboring municipalities. In the Alentejo, this retraction translated into the end of regular passenger service on the section between Évora and Estremoz, which occurred in January 1990, definitively ending railway operations on that connection in the following decades, according to records from Infraestruturas de Portugal from 2011.

The cut in direct connections

The promise of modernization collided with profound contradictions in the articulation between different regional axes, with direct impacts on the lives of those who live in the Baixo Alentejo. Until May 2010, according to data from the Assembly of the Republic published in 2011, the Alentejo Line guaranteed four daily direct connections between Beja and Lisbon, ensuring adequate times and comfort before the suspension of service for major upgrade works. For a population dispersed across 47 municipalities, these direct trains represented the backbone of professional and study commutes toward the northern coast of the country without the need for complex transfer routines.

However, starting in July 2011, the resumption of the rail connection between Lisbon and Beja compulsorily required a transfer at the Casa Branca station, with passengers switching from a regional diesel railcar to the electrified Intercidades, as detailed by the Assembly of the Republic in 2011. This logistical change increased total travel time and generated an immediate drop in the service's competitiveness compared to road transport. Operational fluctuations became extreme, with reports from TVI and data from the Movimento Beja Merece Mais from 2018 reporting travel times that varied unpredictably between 2 and more than 4 hours, depending on the fine-tuning of connections in Casa Branca.

To supply the chronic shortages of CP's regional rolling stock, the public company resorted in 2009 to renting Renfe 592-series railcars, a measure that allowed the shedding of obsolete fleets inherited from the last century but which maintained structural speed limitations on the southern secondary tracks. While axes like the Northern Line saw the trip between Lisbon and Porto fixed at around 3 hours thanks to massive continuous investments, the southern secondary lines faced cuts and suppression of direct circulations, as pointed out by analyses from train driver associations and CP in 2020.

Works and prolonged suspensions

The transformation of the Alentejo railway map was marked by prolonged physical interruptions on the circulation axes, resulting from electrification and track remodeling projects. The modernization project of the Sines-Elvas rail axis and respective connections to the Alentejo implied prolonged suspensions of fundamental sections, starting with the total closure decreed between Bombel and Casa Branca in 2010, according to data compiled by the Portugal Ferroviário portal in 2012. These forced interruptions forced the temporary or permanent replacement of the railway service by complementary road circulations, prolonging temporal uncertainty for passengers in the region.

To try to reverse this scenario of degrading competitiveness, Infraestruturas de Portugal presented in January 2023 new modernization plans centered on the section between Poceirão and Bombel, with the declared objective of enhancing the axis's efficiency and trying to reduce regional travel times in the medium term. However, the practical effects of these structural interventions are slow to reflect homogeneously across the entire secondary network, with major asymmetries remaining between the coast and the deep interior of the Alentejo, where population density per municipality continues to decrease.

Despite the plans and occasional interventions, the national railway network globally maintains a track length very similar to what it recorded at the end of the 19th century, evidencing a persistent stagnation of useful kilometers against the enormous expansion of the national road network, according to data released by Pordata in 2025. Faced with this scenario of immobility in the total length of the network, travel times depend almost exclusively on the acceleration capacity in modernized sections, benefiting district capitals like Évora to the detriment of peripheral territories that lost their original railway centrality.

The obvious reading put to the test

The simplistic reading that the railway universally modernized throughout the Alentejo territory, driven by the recent electrification of the axis to Évora, hides the drastic setback verified in neighboring district capitals like Beja, where the suppression of direct trains and the imposition of transfers to diesel railcars made travel today effectively slower and more complex than in certain phases of the 20th century. To validate this hypothesis, one only needs to cross-reference current schedules with operational data from previous decades, verifying whether the technological gain in some sections compensates for the generalized drop in accessibility in the remaining sub-regions.

In 2025, CP's official timetable in force since December maintains combined tables of Intercidades and Regional services for the Alentejo Line on the Lisbon-Oriente, Évora, and Beja axes, technically validating that the travel time between Lisbon and Évora currently stands between 1 hour and 27 minutes and 1 hour and 33 minutes. This value represents a notable advance compared to records from three decades ago, demonstrating that the Évora axis recovered competitive travel times compared to road transport, bringing the reality of those living in the municipality of Évora closer to the mobility standards of the coast.

However, when the same premise is tested for the connection to Beja, the obvious explanation of universal modernization falls apart: the dependency on mandatory transfers in Casa Branca and the limitations of diesel rolling stock continue to penalize the overall travel time, preventing the Alentejo as a whole from benefiting from a generalized shortening of temporal distances relative to Lisbon. The suppression of the four daily direct connections that existed until May 2010, documented by the Assembly of the Republic in 2011, confirms that in certain areas of the territory the clock is indeed running backward.

The real impact on the territory

The introduction of the Green Railway Pass in October 2024, priced at 20 euros per month by the Government of Portugal through the Ministry of Infrastructure, profoundly altered demand dynamics on eligible regional and intercity trains of the national railway network. For those residing in the 47 municipalities of the Alentejo and regularly using the railway for commuting, this tariff measure drastically reduced monthly transport costs, generating a new wave of influx on compositions circulating on electrified axes and subsidized regional connections.

However, the economic accessibility brought by the pass does not unilaterally solve the temporal constraint imposed by physical infrastructures. While residents in Évora benefit from competitive travel times of around an hour and a half toward the capital, passengers on the Beja axis continue to face logistical constraints inherited from old operational suppressions, showing that railway cohesion in the Alentejo remains fragmented between modernized axes and secondary lines marginalized by the schedules in force in 2025.

The immediate future of regional rail mobility will depend on the capacity to execute new investments in full electrification and the elimination of technical rupture points between lines. Until then, the answer to the initial question remains divided: traveling by train in the Alentejo is substantially faster today if the starting point is Évora, but it continues to be an exercise in patience and lesser comparative speed if the journey starts in Beja compared to the direct offer standards recorded in the last century.