By John — Desalination News
The municipal council of Albufeira has served a partial stop-work order on construction of the Algarve’s seawater desalination plant, the latest flashpoint in a long-running dispute over where Portugal’s first large-scale desalination facility should sit and how far out to sea it should discharge its leftover brine.
The administrative embargo was delivered to Águas do Algarve, the bulk water utility building and will eventually operate the plant, on November 3. Albufeira’s mayor, Rui Cristina, has framed his objection around two issues rather than opposition to desalination itself. The first is procedural: he argues the plant is being built on rural land without the kind of formal recognition of public interest that the municipality’s own master plan requires before construction on such land can proceed. The second concerns the brine the plant will eventually produce. The project’s environmental impact declaration had already called for further study of how deep and how far offshore the discharge outfall should extend, and the mayor wants that outfall pushed deeper and farther from the coast to protect the beaches that anchor the Algarve’s tourism economy.
Exactly how much of the project the embargo covers remains unsettled. An initial reading by government lawyers suggested the notice targets the land itself rather than the construction work underway on it, which would allow most of the building to continue regardless. Águas do Algarve called an urgent board meeting for November 5 to work out its response, while Portugal’s Environment Minister, Maria da Graça Carvalho, said the government was prepared to respond even to a full embargo, as it has to earlier legal challenges, and that she would not be drawn into what she called political games. The episode carries an added wrinkle: Cristina himself sits on Águas do Algarve’s board as a non-executive director, having been appointed to the position on October 1, weeks before his council issued the notice against the utility he now helps oversee.
The plant itself is being built under a design-build-operate contract awarded to a consortium of Luságua, Aquapor and GS Inima Environment and signed in October 2024, a project this site has followed through a series of earlier legal challenges that ultimately failed to halt construction. The contract is worth close to €108 million, split between roughly €103 million for design and construction and €5 million for three years of subsequent operation. The plant is being built in two phases: an initial 500 liters per second, or about 43,200 cubic meters a day, followed by an expansion to 750 liters per second, roughly 64,800 cubic meters a day, with the civil works, intake structures and pipelines for the larger second phase being built from the outset. The design includes a brine outfall running 2.13 kilometers out to sea and seawater intake towers positioned around two kilometers offshore, the same discharge infrastructure now at the center of the mayor’s objection.
A monitoring committee set up at the project’s cornerstone-laying ceremony in July was intended to oversee exactly this kind of concern, bringing together the mayors of Albufeira and neighboring Loulé alongside fishermen’s associations and parish councils to watch over construction and its mitigation measures, brine disposal among them. The project’s original schedule called for substantial completion within 1,115 days of the October 2024 signing, pointing to roughly November 2027, though a source close to the consortium said in September that construction and commissioning would more realistically run into early 2028, with full start-up following in early 2029. Funding for the plant has also shifted during construction, moving from Portugal’s Recovery and Resilience Plan to the European Commission-approved Portugal 2030 cohesion fund.
For a region that has cycled through drought warnings and water restrictions in recent years, the desalination plant has been pitched by the national government as essential infrastructure rather than optional insurance, which is part of why ministers have continued to push the project forward despite repeated local resistance. Whether this latest embargo amounts to a genuine obstacle or another procedural skirmish will depend on how narrowly or broadly the government’s lawyers read its scope, a determination expected to follow the utility board’s response in the coming days.
(Source: Smart Water Magazine, Portugal Resident)