Mota-Engil Resubmits Porto-Soure TGV RECAPE to APA — €1.66 Billion Lot A Drops a 70-Metre Buried Santo Ovídio Station and a Single Road-Rail Douro Bridge

The Mota-Engil-led consortium has resubmitted the environmental compliance report (RECAPE) for Lot A of the Porto-Soure section of the Lisbon-Porto high-speed line on 3 June 2026, six months after the Portuguese Environment Agency (Agência Portuguesa do Ambiente, APA) rejected the previous configuration in December 2025. The new file reworks the two engineering choices APA had flagged as “manifestly different” from the binding preliminary study — moving the Vila Nova de Gaia station underground and folding the twin Douro crossings into a single road-rail structure.

Under the resubmitted design, the Santo Ovídio interchange now sits 70 metres below ground inside a buried platform, a configuration that aligns with the Estudo Prévio (Preliminary Study) approved upstream of the public-private partnership award. The new Douro crossing rolls a single bi-modal bridge into the alignment, replacing the two-bridge scheme rejected by APA last year. The consortium — comprising Teixeira Duarte, Casais, Alves Ribeiro, Conduril and Gabriel A.S. Couto alongside Mota-Engil — signed the €1,661.4 million concession contract for Lot A in July 2025, and the file now governs whether construction reaches the Q4 2026 ground-breaking the lead operator continues to flag.

APA's procedural timeline frames the next 72 days. The agency opens a 15-day public-consultation window on the revised RECAPE, followed by seven days for the consultation report and up to 50 days for the environmental compliance decision itself. If no requests for additional information land, the consortium can hold the Q4 2026 build start that the original PPP envelope penciled. The original target was a January 2026 start, a slippage that the revised file is now meant to recover.

What it changes for the line

The Estudo Prévio targeted a 1-hour-15-minute Porto–Lisboa run-time with 60 services per direction per day, terms the resubmitted RECAPE preserves. The line's first phase is contracted to enter commercial service in 2030 with full completion by 2032 — a sequencing that depends on Lot A's environmental clearance landing without further rework. The Santo Ovídio buried platform also locks the interchange with the Porto Metro Yellow Line's Gaia extension, the connection that anchors Vila Nova de Gaia's claim on the high-speed network.

Infraestruturas de Portugal (IP, the State rail-network operator) had pushed the third PPP package — Lisboa–Galiza — into a January 2026 tender window. Lot A's environmental hold-up is the gate-keeper for the wider sequencing: until APA signs off on the buried Santo Ovídio scheme and the single Douro bridge, the build-out plan for the line and the timing of the Galiza connector remain provisional.

Why it matters now

Brussels' country-specific recommendation released this week singled out Portugal's public-transport offer outside urban cores as “insufficient”, framing the rail gap as a load-bearing input into the housing-price trajectory. A Q4 2026 build start on Lot A is the most visible operational test of that pivot: it converts the Estudo Prévio framework into excavation work on the Gaia side of the Douro, and it sets the schedule that the rest of the high-speed network has to track.

Sources: ECO (3 June 2026), Renascença (Lisboa–Galiza PPP timeline), Diário da República (concession contract publication, July 2025).