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The traditional use of shafts is that of simple geotechnical structures, built to provide direct access to the subsoil to either access existing facilities, or to provide a launch chamber for new excavations. More recently, shafts have been constructed with complex geometries and directly incorporated as part of a permanent basement or metro station. One such complex structure is the Ivens shaft in Lisbon, Portugal, which is yet to be built. The construction of this shaft represents a geotechnical challenge due to its complex shape and location in central Lisbon, surrounded by several historic buildings and having in its close vicinity the Baixa–Chiado metro station. This paper presents a sophisticated three-dimensional numerical simulation of the Ivens shaft construction, with a focus on assessing its effect on the existing buildings and the metro station and on the structural forces induced in its lining. The importance of integrating in the analysis the appropriate constitutive modelling of the different formations, the realistic initialisation of the ground conditions and the stiffness of the buildings, is discussed in detail. Although this is a class A prediction of a specific case study, it provides an insight into the general soil–structure interaction of a complex underground excavation.