A Plan to Put 683 Homes on a Derelict Lisbon Barracks Runs Into Its Neighbours

A walled block of central Lisbon that has sat abandoned for decades — the grounds of the former Campolide barracks, in the Amoreiras district — is at the centre of one of the capital's sharpest planning fights. The site, owned by Novo Banco through a property fund, is slated for a development of 683 homes rising to twelve storeys, alongside shops, offices and a new public garden. A group of residents has spent months trying to stop it, and Público reported this week that they have now escalated their objections to the Ministério Público (Public Prosecutor) and to the European Commission, though the detail of that filing was not accessible to us.

The scheme is large by any measure. Spread across seven lots on a roughly eleven-hectare plot, it packs some 133,000 square metres of construction — about 79,000 of housing and, tellingly, another 47,000 of services and offices — behind a facade of up to twelve floors above ground and five below. Its developer would cede a public green space of more than 12,000 square metres to the city. Lisbon City Council, under mayor Carlos Moedas, unblocked the project in stages across 2023 and 2024 by scrapping an older detailed plan, and ran a public consultation early this year that drew around 200 submissions. The current version is denser than the one approved back in 2016, when the figure was 570 homes.

The residents' case, set out in a petition of roughly 430 signatures, is technical rather than merely nimbyist. Their central charge is that the project was waved through without an Environmental Impact Assessment (Avaliação de Impacte Ambiental) even though its 683 units exceed the 500-home legal threshold that normally triggers one. They add that the weighted green surface falls about 30.5% short of the Municipal Master Plan's requirement, that the council's own mobility department rated the traffic study "not satisfactory," and that unfavourable internal technical opinions were set aside.

Running underneath is the objection that will resonate most with anyone watching Portugal's housing squeeze: the plan contains no affordable homes at all. This is market housing and office space on prime central land, at a moment when Lisbon has cracked the global top five for property-price growth and the country counts fewer than 40,000 homes on the market under €300,000. Building 683 dwellings on a long-derelict block is, on its face, exactly the kind of supply the city keeps saying it needs — but not, the petitioners argue, if the affordable share is zero and the environmental corners are cut.

The route they have reportedly taken is a well-worn one. Taking a planning grievance over a skipped impact assessment to Brussels invokes the EU's Environmental Impact Assessment Directive, and it echoes other 2026 cases — environmentalists complained to prosecutors over Porto's Aurifícia project on similar green-space grounds. Whether any of it slows the Artilharia Um scheme, which had cleared its public-consultation stage by the spring, is unclear.

The episode captures the bind Lisbon cannot escape. The city is desperate for homes, and reviving derelict central land is the least-bad way to build them; municipalities elsewhere are going so far as to cut building fees to a symbolic €1 to coax construction along. Yet each big scheme collides with the neighbourhood it lands in, over height, traffic, trees and who the new flats are actually for. Artilharia Um is that argument in miniature — and, for now, unresolved.