Matosinhos Wants a Perafita Apartment Block Emptied at Once Over an "Imminent" Collapse Risk, Eight Years After Residents Reported Cracks

Matosinhos council has ruled that a privately owned apartment block at number 625, Rua das Farrapas, in Perafita must be emptied "immediately" (desocupação imediata) because a technical study found it faces an "imminent threat of ruin". The owners were told on 2 November and the council confirmed it to Lusa on 5 November, as Observador and Notícias ao Minuto reported. The building has six homes.

According to the council, the study found the building endangers residents and the public road, and puts the water, drainage, electricity and gas networks at risk. The council has ordered permanent monitoring and told the owners to commission an urgent assessment of the structure's safety and stability, and to take whatever measures they see fit. It said it is available to assess a social housing response "if necessary".

Cracks reported since 2018

Numbers 625, 635 and 649 on the street have been followed by the council's inspection commission (Comissão de Vistorias) since 2018, when residents called Civil Protection about cracks. In 2023 an independent specialist assessment found decay in all three entrances, worst at number 625: cracks in structural elements, coatings coming away and signs of possible uneven ground movement. The local PSD called it "absolutely unacceptable" that the council had known since 2018 and done little, and asked for responsibilities to be established.

What the law says when a building is unsafe

The rules sit in the urban building code, the RJUE (Decreto-Lei n.º 555/99):

• Owners must maintain. Article 89 requires conservation works at least once every eight years, and at any time whatever is needed to keep a building safe and sanitary.
• The council can step in. It can order repairs, or the demolition of a building that threatens ruin. Normally an inspection (vistoria) by three council-appointed technicians comes first; the owner gets seven days' notice by registered letter and may send an expert. Those formalities can be skipped when collapse is imminent (Article 90).
• If the owner fails to act, the council can take administrative possession of the building (posse administrativa) and do the works itself (obras coercivas, Article 91). The bill, including the cost of rehousing tenants, goes to the owner (Article 108).
• Administrative eviction. Occupants can be removed so works can be done; this normally runs within 45 days of notice, but can happen at once when collapse is imminent (Article 92).

What it means for tenants

Where a council carries out compulsory works in a rented building, Decreto-Lei n.º 157/2006 bars it from evicting tenants without arranging temporary rehousing at the same time (Article 15). Tenants must be told at least 30 days ahead where they will go and how long works should last (Article 16). Rent remains due but is paid into a deposit, and tenants must move back within three months of being told the works are finished, or the lease lapses (Article 17).

Outside that procedure, the Civil Code obliges a landlord to guarantee the use of the home (Article 1031), and a tenant who loses that use for reasons not of their own making is entitled to a proportional cut in rent (Article 1040), although if the landlord is not to blame either, the cut applies only when the loss lasts more than a sixth of the lease term. Owner-occupiers have no landlord to fall back on: the duty to repair, and the bill, are theirs.

The general rules new homes are built to are also being rewritten, as we reported when Portugal began drafting a successor to its 1951 building rulebook.