Hundreds Turned Setúbal's Main Square Into a Beach on Saturday, Because a Private Estate Wants a Court to Declare Five Real Ones Its Own

At about seven on Saturday evening, several hundred people walked into Praça do Bocage, the main square of Setúbal, carrying beach towels, sun umbrellas, cool boxes and folding chairs, and laid them out on the paving stones. The point of the exercise was to turn the middle of a city into a beach for an hour, because a company is asking a court to turn five real beaches into private property.

The movement behind it is called "Deslarguem a Arrábida!", which translates roughly as "Let go of the Arrábida!". Daniela Rodrigues, of the Bloco de Esquerda (Left Bloc) in Setúbal and one of the movement's promoters, told the Lusa news agency that the turnout was larger than the organisers could count. "Com honestidade fazemos um balanço muitíssimo positivo e foi de tal maneira a adesão que nós não conseguimos dimensionar, mas estamos a falar na casa das centenas," she said: honestly, the assessment is extremely positive, and the turnout was such that we could not size it, but we are talking in the hundreds.

It was the fourth such protest. What sits underneath them is not a government decision, not a tender, and not a concession. It is a set of civil actions filed by a private landowner, and the legal question they turn on is one of the oldest and least understood in Portuguese property law: what a person must prove before a Portuguese court will accept that a beach belongs to them rather than to the State.

What is actually before the court

The plaintiff is Sociedade Palácio da Comenda, S.A., the owner of the Herdade da Comenda, an estate on the western edge of Setúbal where the Serra da Arrábida meets the Sado estuary. Its actions have been running in the Tribunal Judicial da Comarca de Setúbal (Setúbal District Court) since 14 July 2025.

The company is asking the court for two things. The first is a declaration that it holds "propriedade exclusiva", exclusive ownership, of the strip of land carrying the road known as Caminho Municipal 1056, on the basis that the strip is private and not public domain. The second, and the one that has produced the protests, is a declaration that a set of land is in the private domain, and that land includes five beaches: Rasca, Comenda, Rainha, Maria Esguelha and Albarquel. It also includes the banks of the ribeira da Ajuda, the stream that runs down to the estuary, from its mouth in the Sado all the way up to the Parque de Merendas da Comenda picnic area.

Two public bodies are on the other side. The Ministério Público (Public Prosecution Service) is contesting the actions, arguing that the owners have not produced documents demonstrating "amplamente e de modo inequívoco o cumprimento da prova exigida para o reconhecimento de propriedade e posse da margem do estuário do rio Sado" (broadly and unequivocally the fulfilment of the proof required for recognition of ownership and possession of the Sado estuary margin), and that the beaches form part of the maritime public domain.

The Agência Portuguesa do Ambiente (Portuguese Environment Agency, APA) is the other defendant, and it rejects the claim as well. Its position is that the cadastral record excludes those beaches from the Herdade da Comenda holding, and that the case is not even properly framed: "Existe falta de clareza na identificação concreta do objeto da ação pelo facto de a autora não apresentar peça cartográfica à escala adequada, com identificação inequívoca dos limites do prédio relativamente ao qual formula o seu pedido." There is a lack of clarity in identifying the object of the action, because the plaintiff has not produced a map at an adequate scale unambiguously identifying the boundaries of the property it is claiming.

Why Portuguese law starts by assuming the beach is public

The statute that governs this is Lei n.º 54/2005, de 15 de novembro, which establishes the ownership of water resources. It has been amended four times, and the version that matters is the consolidated one.

Article 3 lists what makes up the domínio público marítimo (maritime public domain). Alongside coastal and territorial waters and their beds, paragraph (e) includes "as margens das águas costeiras e das águas interiores sujeitas à influência das marés": the margins of coastal waters and of interior waters subject to tidal influence. Article 4 states, in a single line, that the maritime public domain belongs to the State.

Article 11 then defines how wide a margin is. For sea waters, and for navigable waters under the jurisdiction of the maritime authority or the port authorities, the margin is 50 metres wide, measured from the line limiting the bed. That would be the answer in most cases. But paragraph 5 adds the provision that decides this dispute: "Quando tiver natureza de praia em extensão superior à estabelecida nos números anteriores, a margem estende-se até onde o terreno apresentar tal natureza." Where the land has the nature of a beach beyond the widths set out above, the margin extends as far as the land keeps that character.

In other words, a beach does not stop being part of the public margin at the 50-metre mark. It stays public for as far as it is still a beach. Sand is its own boundary marker.

Article 12 closes the loop. Beds and margins of sea and navigable waters are private only where they have been formally removed from the public domain and sold, or where they have been recognised as private through previously acquired rights, and are "presumindo-se públicos em todos os demais casos": presumed public in every other case. The presumption runs against the claimant. It is the estate that has to prove something, not the State.

The 1864 test

What the estate has to prove is set out in Article 15, and it is a demanding standard by any measure.

Under Article 15(2), anyone seeking recognition of ownership over parcels of the beds or margins of sea waters or navigable waters must prove by documents that the land was, "por título legítimo", by legitimate title, the object of private or common ownership before 31 December 1864. Where cliffs are involved, the date is 22 March 1868.

Those dates are not arbitrary. They mark the point at which Portuguese law brought the coastline into the public domain, and the statute has never moved them. A claim brought in 2025 is therefore a claim about the state of a title deed more than a century and a half ago.

The law does leave two narrower routes. Article 15(3) allows a claimant with no such documents to prove instead that, before those same dates, the land was held in possession in their own name by private parties, or in shared enjoyment by the inhabitants of a defined administrative area. Article 15(4) supplies a fallback where the pre-1864 or pre-1868 documents have become illegible or were destroyed by fire or an equivalent event at the registry: in that case, land proved to have been in private ownership or possession before 1 December 1892 is presumed private.

Article 15(5) exempts a further set of cases from the proof regime altogether, including land formally removed from the public water domain, and land inside a consolidated urban area outside the erosion or sea-invasion risk zone that has been occupied by a building predating 1951, documentarily proved.

The deadline that used to exist, and no longer does

There is a detail here that explains why a case like this can be filed at all in the middle of the 2020s.

When Lei 54/2005 was published in the Diário da República on 15 November 2005, its Article 15(1) gave claimants a closing date. Anyone wanting recognition of ownership over public beds or margins had to bring the action "até 1 de Janeiro de 2014", by 1 January 2014. Lei n.º 78/2013 extended the window. Lei n.º 31/2016, de 23 de agosto, the third amendment to the statute, rewrote Article 15 into the shape it has now.

The rewritten article contains no deadline of any kind. What it contains instead is a new first paragraph assigning the question to the ordinary courts and giving the Ministério Público standing to contest these actions in its own name, "quando esteja em causa a defesa de interesses coletivos públicos subjacentes à titularidade dos recursos dominiais", where the defence of the collective public interests underlying ownership of public-domain resources is at stake.

So the route is open indefinitely, and the prosecutor is a permanent party to it. That is the legal architecture the Setúbal case is running through.

What happens to public access if the estate wins

This is the question most worth answering for anyone who swims at Albarquel or walks the Comenda path, and the answer is not the one the protest framing implies.

Article 21 of the same law deals with privately owned parcels of public beds and margins, and its first paragraph is unambiguous. All such parcels are subject to the easements established by law, "e nomeadamente a uma servidão de uso público, no interesse geral de acesso às águas e de passagem ao longo das águas": and in particular to a public-use easement, in the general interest of access to the waters and of passage along the waters. Fishing, navigation and the policing and inspection of the waters are covered by the same provision.

Article 21(2) adds that no permanent or temporary works may be carried out on such parcels, or in the subsoil or airspace above them, without authorisation from the body with jurisdiction over the corresponding public waters. Article 21(3) obliges the owner to keep the land in good condition and to carry out the hydraulic works the law requires.

And Article 16 gives the State two further instruments. If a private parcel of a public bed or margin is sold, voluntarily or by forced sale, the State has a right of preference over the buyer, and can exercise it over just the fraction of the property that falls inside the bed or margin. The State can also expropriate such parcels outright where that is necessary to bring all the private parcels in a given zone under public ownership. A petition filed in July asked the government to do precisely that with the Herdade da Comenda land.

A win for the estate would therefore change who is on the title. It would not, on the face of the statute, hand anyone the power to fence the sand and charge admission, and it would not extinguish the right of passage along the water.

What this means for you

If you live on the Setúbal peninsula or use these beaches, the practical position today is unchanged. The beaches are open, the case is pending, and no court has ruled. João Cruz, also of the movement, put the uncertainty plainly: "O processo está em tribunal, por isso nós não podemos saber qual vai ser o desfecho." The case is in court, so we cannot know what the outcome will be.

If you own coastal or riverside land anywhere in Portugal, the more useful reading is the other way round. Lei 54/2005 means that a stretch of your registered property can sit inside a public margin without that appearing anywhere in your deed, that the presumption in Article 12 runs against you, that Article 21 subjects the strip to a public-use easement and a works-authorisation requirement regardless of what the land registry says, and that Article 16 gives the State a right of preference if you sell it. The 50-metre rule is the floor, not the ceiling, and where the land is beach it extends as far as the sand does. Anyone buying near the water should be checking the margin line before signing, not afterwards. Our guide to registering rural land on BUPi covers the parallel problem of boundaries that were never properly recorded in the first place.

Setúbal has been an unusually busy stretch of coast this year. In August we reported on wild boars roaming the Arrábida beaches and the city's streets. The wider fight over who reaches the shoreline has surfaced repeatedly: in June, Quercus pressed the environment minister on access to the Grândola beaches, and APA has been working through what concession holders may and may not put on the sand in front of them. If you are simply planning a day out, our guide to going to the beach in Portugal sets out the flags, the lifeguard calendar and the water-quality reporting.

Daniela Rodrigues said the campaign is now linking up with parallel movements along the coast, and announced the next protest for 3 October at Praia da Galé, organised by the platform TAMLA, Tirem as Mãos do Litoral Alentejano (Hands Off the Alentejo Coast). She also criticised Setúbal's municipal executive for what she described as continued silence on the case. The court, meanwhile, has set no date.