Luz Station

Luz Station is a commuter and intercity rail station in the Bom Retiro district of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and home to the Museum of the Portuguese Language. The station first opened on February 16, 1867, and the current building, completed in 1901, was designed by the British architect Charles Henry Driver in a neoclassical style, with its ironwork manufactured by the Glasgow foundry Walter Macfarlane and Co, then shipped in pieces and reassembled in Sao Paulo. The building served as headquarters of the Sao Paulo Railway Company, which built the first rail line connecting the port of Santos to Jundiai, and after a 1946 fire it gained an additional floor during reconstruction; a further fire in 2015 destroyed part of the Museum of the Portuguese Language housed inside, killing one firefighter. Now protected as a national historic heritage site and unable to be expanded, the station handles about 147,000 passengers a day, the second busiest on Sao Paulo's metro-rail network.