… or, a steel and glass roof designed to emulate rows of trees, whichever you prefer. This was the vision Portuguese architect Santiago Calatrava executed in designing Lisbon Oriente Train Station, known to locally as Lisboa Estacion Orient.

Expositions often serve as impetus for major construction projects that impact a city long after the fair is gone. The first of Vancouver’s SkyTrain lines was built in time for Expo 86, which also opened investors’ eyes to real estate values in what is often deemed one of the world’s most livable cities. As mentioned alongside an earlier image taken at San Diego’s Balboa Park, that property received enormous attention and underwent vast improvements – including the construction of buildings that now form an integral part of that city’s history – for 1915’s Panama-California Exposition.

Here in Lisbon, the train station is a legacy of Expo 98, and a successful one at that. One of the world’s largest train stations, with eight platforms and 75 million passengers annually, it’s comparable to New York City’s Grand Central Station. We also found Lisbon Oriente to be clean and efficient, and enjoyed travelling between Lisbon and Porto from this gallery of sculpted trees.

For more images and insights on this traveller’s time  in Lisbon, you may want to have a look at my other site, Exceptional EA.