Cascais Replaces Half a Century of Prefabs With a 32 Million Euro Secondary School, and the President and Prime Minister Attend on Monday

The new Escola Secundária de Cascais (Cascais Secondary School) is inaugurated on Monday at 11:00, ending more than five decades in which the school ran out of buildings that were put up as a temporary solution. The Câmara Municipal de Cascais (Cascais Municipal Council) says the ceremony will be attended by the President of the Republic, António José Seguro, the prime minister, Luís Montenegro, and the council's president, Nuno Piteira Lopes (PSD).

The building represents a total investment of more than 32 million euros and is designed for 1,320 pupils. It has 44 classrooms, laboratories, a library, an auditorium, a performing arts room, a learning support centre, a canteen and a range of spaces intended for the wider school community. The work was co-financed by the Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência (Recovery and Resilience Plan), Portugal's share of the EU pandemic recovery fund, and forms part of a broader council programme of building, extending and upgrading school premises across the municipality.

Fifty-one years in prefabs

The old Escola Secundária de Cascais began operating in 1975 in prefabricated buildings meant to take around 650 pupils. It ended with 21 classrooms and capacity for 813, and by its final years the council describes it as "quite degraded". What had been conceived as a stopgap lasted more than fifty years, and the pupils who finished there this summer were taught in structures older than most of their parents.

The route out of that took seven years. In 2019 the council reached an agreement with the Ministério da Educação (Ministry of Education) under which the municipality, rather than the ministry, would take on building the replacement. The contract began in 2023 on land adjacent to the old premises, a choice that allowed lessons to continue throughout the first phase of construction. The new school had been due to open in 2025, at an investment estimated then at 25.8 million euros. It arrives a year late and about 6.2 million euros dearer, an increase of roughly a quarter on the original figure.

The job is not finished. The second phase covers demolition of the old buildings, construction of a new sports pavilion and the completion of the external works. The pavilion is expected to be ready by the end of 2027, so the school opens formally on Monday without its own indoor sports facility.

Already in use

Monday's ceremony is a formality in one respect: the school opened its doors to the community at the start of September, before the official inauguration, so that pupils, families, teachers and staff could see the premises. Term is already running in the new building.

The nearly doubled capacity, from 813 places to 1,320, is the number that matters locally. That is 507 additional secondary places in a single municipality of the Lisbon metropolitan area, which is the sort of increment that shows up in placement rounds rather than in national statistics.

What this means for you

• If you have teenagers in Cascais: the catchment now has roughly 500 more secondary places than it did, in a purpose-built school rather than prefabs. Placement still runs through the national enrolment system, not the council.
• Indoor sport is the gap: the sports pavilion is not due until the end of 2027. Families should expect physical education arrangements to remain provisional for another two school years.
• Councils are now building schools: the 2019 transfer of this project from the ministry to the municipality reflects a broader devolution of school premises to local authorities. In practice it means questions about buildings, canteens and works go to the câmara, while placements and staffing stay with the ministry.
• Recovery plan money is visible: this is one of the more tangible local outputs of the Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência, and a reminder that similar upgrades are under way in other municipalities.

For the council, the political value of putting a president and a prime minister on the same stage is obvious. For the school itself, the more meaningful date is the end of 2027, when the pavilion is finished and the last of the 1975 buildings is gone.