Águas de Portugal's New President Warns Almada Is Not Alone as a Quarter of the Country's Treated Water Leaks From Ageing Pipes

The new president of the state water group Águas de Portugal (AdP) has warned that the supply failures that pushed Almada to ban all garden watering earlier this month are not a local accident but a warning of what awaits much of the country, where decades of underinvestment have left ageing pipes leaking a quarter of the water that is treated and pumped into them.

Macário Correia, appointed to lead AdP as the government pushes its €5 billion “Água que Une” (Water that Unites) strategy, said Almada “is not an isolated case” and that there are several municipalities where a failure to renew the network could compromise public supply. He has, on his own account, a workload of almost 300 measures meant to guarantee water across Portugal beyond 2030 — and acknowledged he will not manage to deliver all of them.

The scale of the problem is easier to grasp in the numbers than in the rhetoric. More than a quarter of the water that enters Portugal's public networks — about 27 percent — never reaches a tap, lost instead to ruptures, breakdowns and illegal connections along the way. The regulator, ERSAR (Entidade Reguladora dos Serviços de Águas e Resíduos), puts the annual cost of those losses at tens of millions of euros, and estimates the country could squander close to €970 million by the end of the decade if the inefficiencies in the water and wastewater systems are left unaddressed.

What makes the picture harder is the pace of repair. Water mains are being rehabilitated at an average of just 0.6 percent a year, which means the network would take roughly 180 years to renew in full — this against pipes whose useful life is estimated at around 50 years. In practice, the infrastructure is ageing far faster than it is being replaced, and each summer of record consumption and prolonged drought exposes the gap.

Almada was the vivid illustration. Consumption there had run well above the national average when the town declared a situation of alert, set up a crisis cabinet and, ultimately, prohibited the watering of public and private gardens to let its reservoirs recover. Correia's argument is that the same combination — heavy losses, thin investment and demand that spikes without warning — is present in other systems that have simply not yet been tested to breaking point.

His prescription leans less on building new dams than on stopping the waste. Reusing treated water and cutting losses are, he says, the priorities, a stance he has held consistently: there is, in his framing, no shortage of water so much as a shortage of decisions. The government's answer is the multi-billion-euro investment plan, of which the rehabilitation and optimisation of supply systems from north to south accounts for close to €1.5 billion. European money is also on the table — earlier this year the Programa Sustentável 2030 opened fresh calls worth €130 million for water and the circular economy, at high co-financing rates — but the funds have to be applied for, negotiated and put out to tender before a single pipe is changed.

For residents, including the many foreign nationals who have settled in the greater-Lisbon and southern municipalities, the takeaway is less about any single town than about a system running on borrowed time. The alert Correia is sounding is that without a sustained lift in investment and a serious effort to plug the leaks, the kind of disruption Almada endured this summer is likely to become a more familiar feature of Portuguese summers, not a one-off.