Savannah Resources Wins Its Second Administrative Easement at Boticas — Today's Diário da República Clears 24 Plots Inside the C-100 Mining Concession for Geotechnical Drilling, With 2027 Construction and 2028 First Lithium Still on the Calendar

A government dispatch published in today's Diário da República, 6 May 2026, grants Savannah Resources a second administrative easement (servidão administrativa) over 24 properties inside its C-100 mining concession at Boticas, in Trás-os-Montes. Twenty of the plots carry full land registration; four are unregistered. The mechanism gives Savannah immediate access without transferring ownership, with compensation to landowners that the company expects to exceed €100,000.

The easement is the operational unlock the project has been waiting on. With the corridor cleared, Savannah can resume site preparation, shallow boreholes and geotechnical wells across the affected plots. The data those works produce define the construction conditions for the future processing unit and the rest of the surface infrastructure of the Mina do Barroso project.

Why a Second Easement Was Needed

The first administrative easement, published in December 2024, opened the door to fieldwork on a separate set of plots. The intervening eighteen months have been spent on a mix of regulatory steps, owner negotiations and litigation — Savannah CEO Emanuel Proença characterised today's decision as the end of a 'longo processo' and pre-empted further local pushback by noting the company has won previous court challenges. The second easement extends access to the next ring of plots that fall inside the C-100 boundary but had not yet been acquired or contracted bilaterally.

Boticas is the most advanced lithium project in Portugal and one of the few in continental Europe with a full extractive-permits stack. The European Commission has classified it as a Strategic Project under the Critical Raw Materials Act, which is why Lisbon has been willing to use the administrative-easement route rather than wait for negotiated land deals to close one by one. Portugal has already committed roughly €110 million in state financial support to the project.

The 2027/2028 Calendar Holds

Today's publication keeps the construction-start target at 2027 and first-production at 2028. Savannah's stated annual nameplate, once the processing unit is online, is enough lithium to feed batteries for around 500,000 electric vehicles per year. That output sits in the EU's strategic-autonomy calculation: under current European battery-mineral demand projections, a single Boticas-scale operation can carry a meaningful share of Portuguese and Spanish gigafactory feedstock without going through the China-routed concentrate market.

Local opposition is not going away. Associação Unidos em Defesa de Covas do Barroso has already signalled it will challenge the second easement, in part on procedural grounds and in part on continuity arguments around the agricultural-heritage designation of the surrounding pastoral commons. The November 2025 Court of Justice ruling that backed Savannah's environmental-impact authorisation has, however, narrowed the remaining legal channels.

What This Means for Expat Readers

• Energy-transition exposure. A working Boticas plant is the single most material EU-side input into Portuguese exposure to the European battery and EV supply chain. Equity holders of the lithium-adjacent industrial cluster — including chemical and processing names — should treat the 2027 construction window as the trigger for the next leg of capex.
• Property-law signal. The administrative-easement route is now the de facto template for strategic-project access where bilateral land deals stall. Expat property buyers in concession-adjacent municipalities should read the C-100 cartography before purchase.
• Trás-os-Montes labour market. Construction phase peaks at hundreds of jobs and a multi-year supplier pipeline. Foreign residents in Vila Real, Chaves and Bragança looking for engineering, environmental-monitoring and logistics work should track Savannah's procurement calendar through 2027.
• EU funding lens. Boticas is the lead Portuguese case for how Strategic Project status converts to actual ground-truth output. The 2028 first-production milestone is the test the European Commission will use to calibrate the next round of CRM-Act designations.