Almada Bans All Garden Watering as Record Consumption Drains the Town's Water Reserves
Almada is prohibiting all public and private garden watering to refill reservoirs drained by weeks of supply failures and record summer demand. Mayor Ines de Medeiros says two new boreholes and a ban on irrigation should restore breathing room within two to three weeks; regulators are probing illici
Almada, the city facing Lisbon across the Tagus, is banning all garden watering — public and private alike — as it scrambles to refill reservoirs drained by weeks of supply failures at the height of summer.
The measure was announced on Tuesday by Inês de Medeiros, president of the Câmara Municipal de Almada (Almada City Council), after repeated breakdowns left neighbourhoods without water and forced at least one health centre to close its doors. "We will have to be even stricter and prohibit any watering at all, not just public but private too, to see whether in the space of two or three weeks we can recover some breathing room," she said.
The scale of the strain is unusual. The council says 2026 has brought the largest volume of water it has ever distributed in more than 75 years of public supply — a combination of a hot, dry summer and a swollen seasonal population along the Costa da Caparica beaches. In some zones consumption has jumped sharply with no matching rise in billing, a gap the authorities read as a sign of illicit connections drawing water off the network.
A month of failures
The crisis has built steadily. A large burst main cut supply to six areas of the municipality earlier this month, and residents have complained for weeks of intermittent flow and low pressure. The municipal water utility, SMAS Almada (Municipal Water and Sanitation Services), activated a contingency plan and set up a crisis unit, while tanker trucks have been sent to keep the worst-hit spots — including parts of Costa da Caparica — supplied.
De Medeiros has apologised publicly for the disruption and insists relief is close. The council has brought one new borehole (furo) into full operation and expects a second to enter service by the end of July, adding fresh capacity to a system that has been running at its limit.
The episode has also drawn in the regulators. The Entidade Reguladora dos Serviços de Águas e Resíduos (Water and Waste Services Regulator), known as ERSAR, has asked the municipal bodies to explain the failures and has pointed to irregular consumption as part of the problem, while the Agência Portuguesa do Ambiente (Portuguese Environment Agency), or APA, has been drawn into the coordination. Almada has previously been flagged as one of the country's worst municipalities for water losses, where a large share of what is pumped never reaches a paying tap.
What it means for residents
For households, the immediate effect is a blanket ban on outdoor watering: no filling of private gardens, no topping up of pools from the mains, no hosing down of pavements. Enforcement will lean on inspections aimed at unauthorised connections rather than on fining ordinary residents. Essential uses — drinking, cooking, washing — are not affected, and vulnerable facilities such as care homes are being guaranteed supply.
De Medeiros has framed the restrictions as a short, sharp intervention to let reserves recover before the peak August holiday weeks, when Almada's population — and its thirst for water — will swell again.
