Portugal Pins a Price of Up to €8.9 Billion on Its New Lisbon Airport as the First Luís de Camões Renderings Emerge
ANA has priced Portugal's new Lisbon airport, Luís de Camões, at €7.9–8.9 billion and released the first renderings of the terminal planned for Alcochete. It targets a 2037 opening — the government wants 2035 — with a 5,000-page environmental study due by month's end.
Portugal now has a firm price tag, a shape and a timetable for its long-delayed new Lisbon airport. ANA (Aeroportos de Portugal, the Vinci-controlled operator that runs the country's airports) has put the cost of building the future Luís de Camões airport at between €7.9 billion and €8.9 billion at 2024 prices, and this week released the first detailed visualisations of the terminal and runways that will rise on the plains south of the Tagus.
The figures come from a technical report ANA delivered to the government on 16 July, a document more than 250 specialists worked on and one that marks the clearest step yet towards breaking ground. The new estimate sits a little above the €8.5 billion the concessionaire floated when the project was confirmed in January 2025, and it dwarfs any comparable scheme on the continent. “There is no project this large currently in Western Europe,” said Nicolas Notebaert, the chief executive of Vinci Airports, ANA's parent.
The airport will be built at the Campo de Tiro de Alcochete (the Alcochete military firing range), a vast, largely empty tract straddling the municipalities of Benavente and Montijo on the south bank of the river. The location has been fought over for decades, but successive governments settled on Alcochete as the site with room to grow, and the report describes an airport designed to handle more traffic each year than Amsterdam's Schiphol within three years of opening.
On timing, there is a gap between ambition and caution. ANA's own schedule points to the airport opening in 2037, with construction running from 2029 to 2034 and the full licensing application due by January 2028. The government, keen not to let the country's aviation bottleneck drag on, wants to compress that and bring the opening forward to 2035. Either way, relief for the overstretched Humberto Delgado airport in central Lisbon — the Portela field that has run beyond its comfortable capacity for years — remains the best part of a decade away.
The next hurdle is environmental. ANA says its Environmental Impact Study runs to some 5,000 pages and will be submitted by the end of the month, opening a formal assessment that has sunk airport plans before. Only once that clears, and once the financing is settled between the state and the concessionaire, can the project move from paper to earthworks. Those financial arrangements — who pays for what, and how ANA recoups an investment of this scale — still require negotiation with the government.
For residents and travellers, the promise the report leans on hardest is connectivity. The new airport is designed to sit roughly 20 minutes by train from the centre of Lisbon, with rail links built in rather than bolted on, an implicit answer to years of complaints about how awkward it can be to reach and leave Portela at peak hours. The renderings released this week show a long, low terminal wrapped in the kind of daylight-filled concourses now standard at new European hubs.
None of this is guaranteed. Portugal has announced, cancelled and re-announced a new Lisbon airport so many times that a degree of public scepticism is warranted, and every stage from here — environmental sign-off, financing, construction tendering — carries the potential for delay. But with a costed report on the minister's desk, a chosen site and the first credible images of what the finished airport might look like, the Luís de Camões project has moved closer to reality than at any point in its long, stop-start history.
