Defence Minister Asks the PGR for a Legal Opinion on the NATO Ammunition Depot at Sesimbra-Seixal — Half a Century of Illegal Construction Inside the Military Servitude Zone, Demolition Orders Pending and Population Relocation on the Table

Defence Minister Nuno Melo formally asked the Conselho Consultivo da Procuradoria-Geral da República for a legal opinion on 2 April 2026, and the request became public on Friday 1 May through a Lusa report carried by ECO. The subject of the consultation is the NATO ammunition depot straddling the municipalities of Sesimbra and Seixal in the Setúbal district, and the question is what to do about half a century of illegal construction that has built up inside the military servitude zone surrounding the facility. The depot is on the NATO inventory and is described in the Ministry's filing as ‘uma infraestrutura militar de elevada relevância estratégica’.

The Ministry's text, as reproduced by Lusa, is blunt: ‘nos últimos 50 anos, tem-se verificado uma proliferação de construções ilegais’ — over the last fifty years, a proliferation of illegal constructions — inside the buffer area legally reserved around an active munitions depot. The Navy, which administers the perimeter, has run inspections, issued auto de notícia violation reports and produced demolition orders. None of those orders has been executed at scale.

What the Minister Is Asking

The three questions the Defence Minister put to the Conselho Consultivo da PGR — the PGR's standing advisory body that produces binding interpretations for the executive — are operational, not academic.

First, how should the demolition of the existing illegal constructions be carried out, and what is the legally correct sequence for relocating the populations currently living inside the servitude zone. The implication is that demolition without a relocation pathway risks both administrative and constitutional challenge — the Tribunal Constitucional has previously ruled that summary demolition of long-occupied dwellings raises Article 65 (right to housing) and Article 62 (right to private property) issues that cannot be cured by the operational logic of military safety alone.

Second, whether the State should declare the utilidade pública da expropriação of the entire servitude area, removing the question of disputed title and converting the buffer into clean military property. Expropriation under Decreto-Lei 116/2008 (the regime jurídico da expropriação) is the standard route, but it requires the public-utility declaration plus a compensation procedure that runs to the Tribunal da Relação if disputed. The Ministry wants the PGR to confirm that this route is ‘adequada, necessária e proporcional’ — the three-prong proportionality test the Constitutional Court applies to expropriations.

Third, how to coordinate the demolition-and-relocation operation with the municipal authorities of Sesimbra and Seixal, with the Inspeção-Geral da Defesa Nacional, with the Instituto da Conservação da Natureza e das Florestas (ICNF) and with the Comissão de Coordenação e Desenvolvimento Regional de Lisboa e Vale do Tejo. The coordination question matters because the perimeter overlaps three classified environmental categories at once, and a unilateral defence-led intervention would trigger an environmental-impact-assessment challenge in the administrative courts.

The Environmental Overlap

The military servitude zone around the depot sits on top of three classifications: Natura 2000 network coverage (the EU's Habitats Directive 92/43/EEC instrument, transposed by Decreto-Lei 140/99), the national Reserva Ecológica Nacional (REN), and the Zona Especial de Conservação Fernão Ferro/Lagoa de Albufeira (ZEC PTCON0054). The Lagoa de Albufeira lagoon system, set behind the dunes south of the Tróia peninsula's neck, is one of the few coastal lagoon ecosystems on the Portuguese west coast outside the Algarve. Fernão Ferro itself is a Sesimbra parish whose population has expanded from about 6,500 in the 2001 census to over 13,000 in the 2021 INE recensement — the bulk of that growth physically pressing against the depot's buffer.

The ZEC designation forbids construction or land-use change without an environmental compatibility assessment. Demolition is technically a permissible operation, but the relocation that would have to follow — building new housing for the displaced families — would itself require ZEC clearance unless sited outside the conservation perimeter. That logistical knot is part of why successive defence ministries have left the file alone.

The Depot

The Paiol da NATO at Sesimbra-Seixal — administered by the Marinha and integrated into NATO's logistic-pre-positioning network — has been on the same site since the 1950s, when the choice of a coastal location with limited population density and rail access from the Cacilhas-Pinhal Novo branch made operational sense. The settlement pressure that surrounded it from the 1970s onwards was driven by Greater Lisbon's southward sprawl across the Tagus, accelerated after the Ponte 25 de Abril opened in 1966 and the A2 motorway extended south. By 2026, parishes inside or immediately adjacent to the depot's traditional safety perimeter — Fernão Ferro, Quinta do Conde, Aldeia de Paio Pires — host populations in the tens of thousands. The depot itself remains operational and is referenced in NATO's host-nation support arrangements.

The Legal Architecture

Military servitude in Portugal is governed by Decreto-Lei 45 986/1964 — the Lei das Servidões Militares, a pre-revolution statute updated piecemeal but never wholesale. The statute gives the Ministry of National Defence the power to designate, around any installation it considers strategically sensitive, a perimeter inside which construction, agricultural use change and certain commercial activities require prior military authorisation. Construction performed inside the perimeter without authorisation is by law illegal and subject to demolition without compensation — but the political cost of executing demolition against long-installed populations, in many cases with municipal building licences subsequently issued in good faith by the câmara, has historically frozen the file.

The PGR opinion, when delivered, will set the legal framework the next concrete intervention runs on. The Conselho Consultivo's pareceres are not court judgments but they bind the executive that requested them, and they are routinely cited by the Tribunal Constitucional and the Supremo Tribunal Administrativo when the underlying acts reach litigation. Defence-ministry pareceres of this scope normally take six to nine months to deliver; the Conselho's calendar is currently running the National Defence Council's organic-law revision and the Forças Armadas' personnel-statute review in parallel, both files with formal time pressure.

Why the File Is Moving Now

Three things have shifted the political calculus. First, NATO's Madrid 2022 and Vilnius 2023 communiqués both reaffirmed Portugal's host-nation obligations on logistic pre-positioning, and the alliance's post-Ukraine ammunition-stockpile uplift has materially increased throughput at the depot — making the safety perimeter a live, not theoretical, issue. Second, the Montenegro government's commitment to 2% of GDP NATO defence spending, achieved in 2025, has put the Ministry of Defence under pressure to demonstrate operational seriousness on inherited files. Third, a series of Tribunal Administrativo de Almada decisions over the last eighteen months — small in volume but consistent in direction — have ordered the Marinha to either execute long-pending demolition orders or vacate them, and the Ministry has decided it needs a PGR opinion before choosing which.

What This Means for Expats

• The depot is operational and unaffected by the consultation. The Sesimbra-Seixal NATO ammunition site continues to function. The PGR opinion concerns the buffer zone, not the depot itself.
• Property purchases inside the Fernão Ferro / Quinta do Conde / Pinhal de Negreiros belt warrant a servidão check. Foreign buyers in the Sesimbra-Seixal periphery should request a Câmara Municipal certificate confirming that the parcel sits outside the military servitude perimeter, in addition to the standard caderneta predial / certidão de teor checks. The servitude designation is registrable and any title search by a competent Portuguese conveyancer will identify it.
• Demolition orders, if executed, will follow due process. Any demolition will carry an administrative notification, a contestation window, and — under Article 268 of the Constitution — a right to be heard before execution. The PGR opinion will set the procedural template; expect a 12-24 month implementation timeline at minimum.
• Expropriation route would carry market-value compensation. If the State opts for the public-utility expropriation path, owners receive market-value compensation under Decreto-Lei 116/2008, with appeal to the Tribunal da Relação. Foreign owners enjoy the same rights as Portuguese nationals.
• Environmental overlap helps the longer-installed. The Natura 2000 / REN / ZEC overlay limits where the State can resite displaced families, which in practice slows the file and favours owners who can demonstrate long-standing occupation with municipal-licence cover.
• Watch the PGR calendar. The opinion is the next milestone. Until it issues — likely Q4 2026 at the earliest — no concrete demolition or expropriation programme is realistic. Property transactions inside the perimeter are not blocked, but disclosure obligations are heightened.

For Lisbon's defence-policy file, the depot consultation is a small but characteristic test. Portugal's NATO host-nation footprint sits on assets — the Lajes air base in the Açores, the Beja air base, the Sesimbra-Seixal ammunition depot, the Monte Real F-16 base, the Tancos paratrooper base — that were sited in the 1950s and 1960s on land that was rural at the time and is in several cases now suburban. Each carries its own version of the same problem: a strategic facility, a creeping population, and a half-century of light enforcement that has produced, in Sesimbra-Seixal's case, a perimeter the State no longer fully controls. The PGR opinion will not solve any of that, but it will set the rule for the next chapter.