Ground Breaks on Portugal's First High-Speed Rail Section at the End of September, While the Concession Company's Own Site Says the Environmental Check Is Still Open

The first spades go into the ground on Portugal's high-speed railway at the end of this month. Álvaro Fonseca, chief operating officer of AVAN Norte, told an audience of about 150 people at a public information session in Aveiro on Tuesday evening that site works on the Porto to Oiã section begin "at the end of this month", starting from the southern end, around Aveiro, with several work fronts opening at once.

The sequence he set out is specific. September brings the assembly of the site compounds for two bridges, one over the Rio Largo and one over the Rio Vouga. October brings the first excavations, along with clearing and earthworks. After roughly two decades in which the Lisbon to Porto high-speed line existed mainly as a slide in ministerial presentations, that is the point at which it becomes a construction site.

What the Porto to Oiã section is

AVAN Norte is the concessionária (concession company) responsible for designing, building, financing, maintaining and making the section available. It was formed by seven Portuguese construction groups: Mota-Engil, Serena, Teixeira Duarte, Casais, Alves Ribeiro, Conduril and Gabriel Couto. Its registered office is in Porto and its executive team is led by Eduardo Pimentel as chief executive, with Fonseca as chief operating officer. The project carries European Union funding through CINEA, the Commission's climate, infrastructure and environment executive agency.

By the concession company's own published figures, the section runs about 71 kilometres from Porto-Campanhã to Oiã, with a further 17 kilometres of connections to the existing Linha do Norte (Northern Line). The investment is put at 1,978 million euros. The works include adapting Porto-Campanhã station for high speed, a new station in Vila Nova de Gaia, a new bridge over the Douro, and a link to the Linha do Norte at Canelas. Along the route sit 15 viaducts totalling 9,595 metres and eight tunnels totalling 6,340 metres, plus hydraulic and wildlife crossings and the road and farm-track reinstatements needed to keep the land either side of the line connected.

AVAN's own frequently asked questions page says construction is expected to run from 2026 to 2030, with different work fronts along the route.

The sentence still sitting at the top of the concession company's website

Here is the part worth pausing on. Every page of AVAN's website currently carries a standing banner that reads, in Portuguese: the Porto to Oiã high-speed line "is in the phase of verification of the environmental conformity of the execution project".

Its own FAQ is more explicit still. Asked when works start, it answers that they are expected to begin in 2026, "after the conclusion of the environmental conformity verification process and the approval of the execution project". Asked how a reader can find out whether their property is affected, it answers that confirmation "will only be possible after the conclusion of the process of approval of the Relatório de Conformidade Ambiental do Projeto de Execução", the environmental conformity report, known by its initials as the RECAPE.

Part of the section has cleared that hurdle. In August the Agência Portuguesa do Ambiente (APA, Portuguese Environment Agency) issued a Título Único Ambiental for subsections 4 and 5, the Porto exit through Vila Nova de Gaia, which is the stretch that had been stalled by the Douro bridge design and the Gaia station siting. Those same subsections had been out to public consultation in June. But the banner on the concession company's homepage speaks about the line as a whole, and it was still there on Tuesday night, hours after the Aveiro session ended.

Five hundred parcels, three hundred contacted

The expropriations are running ahead of that. Fonseca said that in the municipality of Aveiro alone about 500 parcels of land are affected, that roughly 300 of the owners have been contacted, and that more than 120 agreements have been reached. "AVAN's objective is to reach agreement with the majority of owners," he said, describing the negotiation as one the company wants to keep amicable.

Portuguese law gives the state and its concessionaires a route to take land for a public purpose, and it also gives owners a defined set of steps, deadlines and valuation rules along the way. If you own land anywhere near the alignment, the practical detail matters: how the offer arrives, how long you have to answer it, what you can do if the figure is too low, and what happens if the land is never used for the purpose it was taken for. We have set that out separately in our guide to expropriation in Portugal.

The questions the room asked

The session, held at the Centro de Congressos de Aveiro, was aimed at the residents of the freguesias the route crosses: Eixo e Eirol, and Requeixo, Nossa Senhora de Fátima e Nariz. AVAN's published events calendar also lists a mobile service point at Válega on Thursday 17 September, at the parish council offices.

Two questions came back from the floor. The first was about tunnelling close to existing houses. Company representatives said there would be no direct effect on foundations, and that a vibration monitoring programme is planned both during and after construction. They conceded, though, that where houses sit very close to the excavation "there may be a need for some temporary relocation of people". The second was about wells. The company said water quality and water levels near the works will be monitored.

Fonseca also pointed to jobs, saying a maintenance centre in the Estarreja area "will have to employ a good number of people" to keep the line running, on top of the construction work itself.

Why Aveiro's mayor is pleased

Luís Souto Miranda, president of the Câmara Municipal de Aveiro (Aveiro City Council), was at the same session and framed the line as a strategic gain for the city. Aveiro, he said, sits on "a very important axis, the one that extends up to Galicia", and the project would put Vigo "a little more than an hour from Aveiro". He also tied it to the existing infrastructure at the northern end, naming Francisco Sá Carneiro airport in Porto.

That is the case for the line in one sentence, and it is worth holding alongside the case against rushing it. The northern section is the first of three phases of a Porto to Lisbon line whose eventual selling point is a journey time of about an hour and a quarter. Getting there depends on the second concession, Oiã to Soure, which has had a bumpier procurement history, and on rolling stock that is still being tendered.

What this means if you live in Portugal

• If you own land near the route, the expropriation clock is already running for hundreds of owners in Aveiro. The formal steps and the deadlines attached to them are not optional courtesies, and the first written offer is not the last word on the price.
• If you are buying near a planned station, the alignment at the Porto end is now fixed enough to move land values, but the southern end is still moving. Treat an agent's map as marketing until you have seen the published plans.
• If you rely on the Linha do Norte, the connection points at Canelas and Oiã mean the existing line is part of this project, not separate from it, so expect disruption on the conventional service as well.
• On the timetable, 2030 is the concession company's own construction window for this section alone. Portuguese megaprojects are rarely early. Treat any date as an intention, not a booking.

The remarks made at Tuesday's session, including the expropriation counts and the start dates, were reported by the Lusa news agency. The project figures, the construction window and the environmental-conformity wording are taken from AVAN Norte's own published pages.