S164 Barracuda
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A decommissioned Portuguese Navy submarine that has been turned into a museum ship and put on public display in a dry dock in the Cacilhas district of the wider Lisbon municipality across the Tagus River opposite the old city centre. You can explore most of the vessel’s interior, from the torpedo section in the bow all the way to the submariner bunks in the stern.
More background info: The submarine was ordered in 1964 from France, built from 1965 at a shipyard in Nantes, launched in 1967 and commissioned for the Navy of Portugal in 1968. S164 Barracuda was the second of a total of four Albacora class submarines, based on the French Daphne class design.
It was an attack submarine armed with as many as 12 torpedo tubes, eight in the bow, four in the stern (calibre 550mm). Propulsion was diesel electric, top speed 16 knots, with a maximum range of ca. 2700 nautical miles (5000km). The vessel is almost 58m (190 feet) in length and had a crew of 54 – but only 36 bunks, so they were shared under the so-called “hot bunking” system (i.e. taking turns, getting into a prewarmed bunk when one submariner’s shift began and another’s ended).
Barracuda took part in numerous missions, including joint ones with the British Royal Navy as well as in NATO exercises and missions, such as “Operation Sharp Guard”, a 1993-96 naval blockade against the former Yugoslavia.
Apparently, Barracuda sank one surface ship, the Portuguese gas tanker Bandim, on 15 December 1982, in what seems to have been an emergency action after the vessel had been on fire, lost control and posed a risk to navigation. But full details of the incident are hard to come by.
During its service life, S164 Barracuda completed over 3000 days at sea, travelling a total distance of the equivalent of twelve circumnavigations of the globe. In 2010, so 42 years after having entered service, the submarine was decommissioned (as the last one of the Albacora class subs).
After extensive restoration work, S164 Barracuda opened as a museum vessel in May 2024. It’s been permanently placed in an old dry dock in Cacilhas and made accessible to the general public as one of the district's newest attractions.
What there is to see: the sleek, black hull of the sub, with its strange protuberances and eight torpedo tube hatches at the bow, looks impressive and quite sinister as such. But it’s the inside that’s the main attraction.
You enter the sub through an opening that was cut into the hull near the bow and first find yourself in the main torpedo-tube compartment. One of the tubes has the rear part of a torpedo poking out of it, another is half open so you can see inside.
Interestingly there are crew bunks even right by the torpedoes. Little signs on the bunks with a crossed-out pictogram of a bed indicate that visitors are not supposed to have a little test-lie-down in any of the bunks. I wasn’t even tempted, as I couldn’t see myself even fitting in them, being quite tall … whereas submariners have usually always been recruited from more “vertically challenged” ranks.
For me, the cramped interiors of submarines add an extra layer of claustrophobic and hence somewhat dark atmosphere to the whole concept of submarines. The clandestineness of subs’ operations, being hidden deep under the sea, and its military purpose add yet more dark elements.
Looking up you can see escape hatches with ladders folded under them … reminding you of the risks involved in underwater navigation/warfare. The lack of privacy for the ordinary crew is emphasized by the flimsy yellow little curtains on the side of the bunks (hardly enough to keep light and sound at bay), also the tiny communal washroom next door. The single small flush toilet WC room at least has a door for some privacy.
Moving on you come to the noticeably swisher officers’ mess, with leather-upholstered benches, wood-panelling and even a VCR on a shelf.
Next comes the “bridge”, the heart of the submarine. You can see the periscope tube and ocular, a navigation table with a map of the waters around southern Portugal, and the whole room is stuffed full with vintage technology, from radar screens to ancient teleprinters as well as lots of equipment whose purposes remain mysterious to the untrained eye, although I think one of the stations may have been that for the sonar operator. In one corner is a depth meter – and it goes to 600m, even though the normal maximum depth the sub could operate at was only 300m.
Across one set of equipment is an inscription reading “A patria honrae que a patria vos contempla”, which according to DeepL translates as ‘The fatherland honours and looks to you’ (maybe that should have been “looks up to you’? … the translation into German would suggest so: ‘Das Vaterland ehrt und verehrt euch’).
Amongst all the mysterious technology is also some kind of air-cleaning apparatus using, as a (bilingual) sign explains, granulated soda lime to filter out carbon dioxide from the air inside the sub.
Familiar equipment can be seen in the sub’s galley, with its silvery steel cooking pots, crockery and work surfaces and a large fridge/larder in a corner.
In one section, glass flooring allows a view into the engine room below (which is otherwise not accessible, though).
Past yet more tubes, cables, wheels, meters and cabinets of all manner of technical equipment you eventually come to the aft section with yet more bunks as well as the stern torpedo tubes along with a device for setting off decoys, which on contact with water would produce a cloud of air bubbles to disorient enemy sonar and confuse torpedoes, as a sign explains. Another depth meter in one corner in this section goes to only 400m. Why so much less than the other one in the bridge compartment I cannot say. A small tube screen in another corner plays some footage but as far as I can remember it didn’t have English subtitles.
And then you exit the submarine’s hull at the gangway at the stern. From there you can also see the sub’s propellers as well as the dry dock’s permanently closed lock beyond.
And that’s it. It’s not an awful lot that there is to see, and the dark aspects are rather more indirect, but I still found it a cool flourish to my day’s exploring of Cacilhas.
Location: on the waterfront of Cacilhas, Almada, in the greater Lisbon municipality, opposite the inner city on the other side of the Tagus River.
Google Maps locator: [38.6868, -9.1467]
Access and costs: fairly easy to get to; not too pricey.
Details: for getting to Cacilhas see the access part of that chapter.
From the ferry terminal it’s just a few minutes’ walk south along the waterfront just past the cluster of bus and tram stops.
You have to get your admission ticket from a little booth outside the dry dock and then use the barcode on the ticket to get through the gate at the bow gangway.
Opening times: Tuesday to Sunday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; closed Mondays.
Admission: 4 euros (7 euros in combination with the neighbouring 19th century frigate)
Time required: I spent just over 20 minutes at the Barracuda, but more dedicated maritime/submarine history buffs intent on examining every detail of the boat could probably spend much longer here.
Combinations with other dark destinations: The abandoned former “Lisnave” shipyards of Cacilhas are just down the road and thus make the perfect combination.
See also under Lisbon for dark attractions in the actual city of Lisbon (Cacilhas is part of Almada, and forms part of the larger Lisbon municipality but not of Lisbon as such).
Combinations with non-dark destinations: There’s yet another museum ship in the immediate vicinity of S164 Barracuda, namely the Dom Fernando II e Glória, a 50-gun wooden frigate from the mid-19th century, turned into a museum ship since the 1990s and moved to Cacilhas in 2008. But as its service period falls outside the time frame for dark tourism assumed on this website (see here) I did not visit it. The ticket for the frigate (7€) includes access to the Barracuda as well (opening times are the same: Tue-Sun, 10-17h).
