Albufeira's Mayor Moves to Embargo the Algarve Desalination Plant, Two Days After Sitting In on the Water Company's Board

Albufeira's mayor, Rui Cristina, has announced an embargo on the works for the Algarve's seawater desalination plant, the region's main new source of drinking water, saying the project breaches the municipality's Plano Diretor Municipal (PDM, the council's master land-use plan). Environment Minister Maria da Graça Carvalho replied the same day that, on her lawyers' first reading, the order applies to the land rather than to the works themselves, and that "the works, for the most part, can continue", according to Lusa reports carried by Notícias ao Minuto and Observador.

Cristina, elected for Chega, made the announcement in a video on social media on Friday 30 October. He said he is not against desalination as such, but wants the project changed: a longer outfall pipe, and the brine (the salty water left over once fresh water has been extracted) discharged deeper and further from the coast.

The minister's answer

Speaking to journalists in Faro, Carvalho said she had learned of the embargo while travelling and was still examining it. "The embargo is an embargo on the land," she said. She welcomed the mayor's statement that he does not oppose the plant, but said she would not take part in "political games" that delay solutions for the Algarve.

"Even if it were an embargo, we would have ways to react, as we always have in all the embargoes and injunctions that have been imposed on us, which we have always won and always resolved," she said.

No written embargo order had been published on the council's website by Saturday night, so its exact legal scope rests on the two sides' public statements.

A board member as well as a mayor

Cristina is not only the plant's most prominent critic. Since the shareholders' meeting of 1 October, he has also sat as a non-executive member of the board of Águas do Algarve, the state-controlled company building the plant, alongside the mayor of Castro Marim, according to the company's own announcement. Águas do Algarve says the board met on 28 October at the Albufeira Poente wastewater plant, with Cristina present: two days before he announced the embargo.

What is being built

According to Águas do Algarve's project site, the plant:

• will draw seawater about 500 metres off Praia da Rocha Baixinha, through structures on the seabed;
• will produce 43,200 cubic metres of drinking water a day, or 16 cubic hectometres (16 million cubic metres) a year, with room to expand to 24;
• will include about 6 kilometres of undersea pipes, both to take in seawater and to return the brine, which the company says will be released through diffusers designed from studies of currents and dispersion;
• will feed only the public supply network, which serves homes, schools, health services, hotels and shops;
• is an investment of about 109 million euros.

The project site still gives 2028 for the start of operations. The new chair of Águas do Algarve, Helena Lucas, told MPs on 13 October that the plant should start supplying water in the first quarter of 2029, as we reported at the time. She put the Algarve's yearly draw for public supply at about 75 cubic hectometres, so the plant's first phase would cover roughly a fifth of it.

Not the first legal challenge

The plant has been fought in court before. In April, Seacliff, the former owner of the expropriated land at Olhos de Água and of the neighbouring Pine Sun Park holiday complex, filed an injunction at the Tribunal Administrativo e Fiscal de Loulé (Loulé Administrative and Tax Court) against the acts behind the project, Lusa reported via Observador in May. Águas do Algarve said then it would contest it. When construction was authorised in April, Cristina had already promised to take "all necessary measures" to stop it.

Why it matters for residents

The Algarve's public supply depends on its reservoirs and aquifers, and so on rain. The desalination plant is meant to give the region a source that does not. Any long delay would push back the date when that water reaches household taps, and the changes the mayor wants concern the part of the design that carries the brine out to sea. For now, neither side has said that work on the site has stopped.

The minister was in Faro the day the Agência Portuguesa do Ambiente (Portuguese Environment Agency, APA) signed an 11-month study on the region's nearly full landfills, the Algarve's other large infrastructure question this winter.