A 12.8-Kilometre Bypass Opens East of Évora, and the Unfinished Stretch of the IP2 Has Sat Idle Since 2011

A 12.8-kilometre bypass east of Évora opened on Thursday, giving the city a dual-carriageway route around its edge and taking a long-delayed piece of the Itinerário Principal 2 (Main Route 2) off the drawing board. The Variante Nascente a Évora do IP2 cost 54.9 million euros and was paid for out of the Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência (Recovery and Resilience Plan), the national channel for European recovery money.

The new road links the Évora Nascente junction of the A6 motorway to the Estrada Nacional 18, on the stretch between the city and the IP2. It is built to motorway standard, with two lanes in each direction and a central divider.

Seven hundred million for the Alentejo

Presiding over the opening, Secretary of State for Infrastructure Hugo Espírito Santo used it to announce a larger number. Infraestruturas de Portugal (Infrastructure of Portugal), the state road and rail company, will invest 700 million euros in the Alentejo through the end of 2028, split between road and rail works and spread across the region's three districts.

His argument was that the visible projects are not the whole story. "With 700 million euros, there is a lot of work done that perhaps we do not look at with this pomp and circumstance, but which gets built," he said. He also credited the recovery plan with pulling Infraestruturas de Portugal out of what he called several years of minimum maintenance and into a new investment cycle. On road safety, he made the case for the profile itself: two lanes with a central divider are, he said, considerably safer.

The part that is still missing

The IP2 is not finished, and both opposition parties in Évora said so on the day. The local organisation of the PCP (Portuguese Communist Party) called for the completion of the section between the new bypass and the Ramal de S. Manços, where works stopped in 2011 and have not resumed. Asked about that gap, Espírito Santo called it "a subsequent step" and said the company was working out when it could be launched.

Luís Dias, the PS (Socialist Party) member of parliament for Évora, welcomed the road but objected to the credit: it was, he said, part of a strategy defined under Socialist governments and financed through a recovery plan those governments negotiated.

The most concrete claim of the day came from Évora's deputy mayor, Jerónimo José, who said studies point to the bypass removing 30 to 40 percent of the traffic circulating inside the city, mostly heavy vehicles and north-south journeys with no reason to enter Évora at all. For a UNESCO-listed centre inside a medieval wall, that is the point of the project.

What this means for expats

• If you drive the Lisbon to Spain corridor: the new link ties the A6 to the EN18 without routing you through Évora, which should cut journey times on north-south trips through the Alentejo Central.
• If you live in or near Évora: expect the heavy-vehicle traffic to thin first. Local traffic patterns inside the walls usually take a season to settle after a bypass opens.
• If you are buying in the region: the 700 million euro programme runs to the end of 2028 and covers rail as well as road, so access should keep improving across all three Alentejo districts.
• No new tolls here: this is a national road built with recovery-plan money, not a concession. Our guide to paying Portugal's motorway tolls covers the A6, which does charge.

The Alentejo has hosted some of Portugal's most troubled infrastructure work. The 460 million euro Évora to Caia railway is being stripped of catenary and signalling by thieves while certification slips, and elsewhere on the border, 72 kilometres of missing motorway landed on the minister's desk only this week. Against that, 12.8 kilometres delivered on a recovery-plan deadline counts as a good day.