Opponents outline “the great big lie”
Yesterday’s “historic moment” when the government signed a €108 million contract for the construction of a desalination plant in Albufeira may not have been more than expedient theatre.
This is because in all the pomp and celebration of Tuesday’s signing salient realities were pushed to one side – indeed, very little was said about the millions of euros this project will cost the country (as it is not fully covered by PRR funding); on the damage it will do to the sea and local environment, and on the considerable obstacles that persist before the first pipelines and infrastructure can even start to be laid.
The Resident has been talking to opponents, including homeowners who point blank refuse to give up land for the “derisory amounts of money” they claim to have been offered.
One told us: “The fact that a construction contract has been signed means absolutely nothing.
“Águas do Algarve is unlikely to be able to meet the deadlines, especially the deadline for submitting the second part of the environmental licence to APA (the Portuguese Environment Agency). It will also have to submit the environmental assessment of the execution project in order to obtain the DECAPE (declaration of environmental conformity of the execution project).
“The plant’s construction still has to be licensed by Albufeira City Council – and up till now there has been no process even presented to the council for approval.
“The DIA (environmental impact statement) is being contested and when the time is right, we will file an injunction to stop construction. So this whole process is a big lie, and what happened with the signing of the contract was yet another chapter in this lie”.
The principal lie is that “authorities want us to believe that this infrastructure will minimise or even solve the Algarve’s water problems (…) If this was the case, why haven’t the hundreds of desalination plants built in Spain solved Spain’s water problems? As far as we know, Spain still has extremely serious water problems, even in areas served by their desalination plants”.
Then there is the question of the PRR deadlines: the plant has to be completed during 2026 – something sources with inside knowledge believe is ‘impossible’.
“This deadline will not be met”, said one source who actually believes that the companies signing yesterday’s agreement are already fully aware of this.
Be that as it may, there is also the matter of legal action taken out against the project. None of the cases have been decided upon, nor have expropriation orders for land ‘required’ been enacted.
“Yesterday’s signing was all about playing politics”, a local suggests. “It looks more like a piece of theatre than a viable project for the Algarve”.
This is a view corroborated by biological engineer Cláudia Sil, attached to CCMAR (the Algarve university’s centre for marine sciences) and a member of the consultative council on water and ecosystems at the CCDR Algarve, who told us: “I admire the courage of the signatories of the contract. Perhaps they are not familiar with the court cases, or perhaps they blindly trust in justice. They must be confident that the project and the respective RECAPE Environmental Compliance Report for the Execution Project that they are going to invest in and present will comply with the requirements of the DIA (favourable but highly conditional) and will be accepted, after the public consultation, despite the consortium’s absolute lack of experience in this type of project.
“It is also admirable how the budget initially planned in the PRR has been more than doubled, and that it comes not from the PRR but from national coffers (there are fewer and fewer people capable of doing the maths…)”.
Cláudia Sil adds that she finds it “regrettable” that what is essentially only half a project (“since no one is hiding the fact that there will be an expansion in the future to at least double the production capacity of desalinated water”) appears to be able to “pass through the sieve of environmental impact assessment”.
Tackling the elephant in the room, Eng Sil addresses the much-parroted “structural shortage of water in the Algarve”, suggesting people are being brainwashed into believing there is no water. There is water. There may well be an insufficiency in relation to demand – but if that demand is excessive, that too needs to be tackled before one embarks on a multi-million euro project that detractors set out to show will cause much more harm than good.
For now, “it is what it is”: the clock is ticking on PRR funding, on timelines, and residents facing expropriation orders are bristling for a fight.
natasha.donn@portugalresident.com
