Pomarão Water Intake Solution already being contested through courts
Algarve water company ‘Águas do Algarve’ has today launched the international public tender to ‘reinforce the Algarve’s water supply through a water intake in Pomarão’, with a base price of €101 million, the government has announced.
According to a statement from the Ministry of Environment and Energy: “This Friday, the company Águas do Algarve launched the international public tender for the contract for the “Reinforcement of Water Supply to the Algarve – Pomarão Water Intake Solution”.
The contract, divided into three lots, has an execution time of 460 working days (around two years).
“This is an investment aimed exclusively at meeting the needs of water for human consumption,” said the Minister for the Environment and Energy, Maria da Graça Carvalho, quoted in the statement.
The government’s understanding is that the project will increase the resilience and hydraulic capacity of the Algarve’s drinking water supply system by 30 cubic hectometres (hm3) per year.
Provided for in the Plan for Recovery and Resilience (PRR), the project had been the subject of a request by Águas do Algarve to increase the investment amount from €72.8 million euros to €109 million, which includes the contract and studies.
Said the minister: “We agreed that, given the great strategic importance of this work and the manifest insufficiency of the initially projected values concerning the objectives that were intended to be achieved, this increase in funds was justified to say that a project that will have a very positive impact on water availability in the Algarve will be carried out.”
Maria da Graça Carvalho stressed that this work is only possible because Spain signed an agreement under the Albufeira Convention, which, among other things, “paved the way for the definition of an ecological regime for the Guadiana River, with the remaining water to be shared equally between the two countries.”
The project involves removing surface water from the estuarine zone of River Guadiana near the village of Mesquita, upstream of Pomarão, in the municipality of Mértola (Alentejo), and constructing a pipeline to the Odeleite reservoir in the municipality of Castro Marim (Algarve).
The environment and energy minister will be in Faro on Sunday to announce the launch of this tender and to sign protocols that will enable the implementation of definitive solutions for access to water for human consumption for the populations of Mesquita and Espírito Santo, in the municipality of Mértola.
This is one measure to combat what the government continually labels as ‘the drought in the region’. Other projects include the construction, also for well over €100 million, of a desalination plant and reducing water losses in the urban sector.
But there are many professional sources who argue that the ‘solutions’ are misguided and will not do what they promise.
While lawsuits are in place over the desalination plant, they have also been lodged over the ‘Pomarão Water Intake Solution’, on the basis that it poses severe risks to the local ecosystem and communities.
Pomarão is described by Lusa as a small Alentejo village on the banks of the River Guadiana, located in the municipality of Mértola, in the district of Beja, bordering Spain to the east and the Algarve municipality of Alcoutim to the south.
Source material: LUSA
