Technical planning underway for long-term solution to water shortages in the region
The long-anticipated plan to bring water from the Alqueva dam in the Alentejo to dams in the drought-prone Algarve is officially moving forward.
A technical meeting held this week between the Algarve municipalities association (AMAL) and the contractor kicked off the process, with a detailed terms-of-reference document now being created and set to be delivered within 40 days.
According to AMAL, the technical planning phase, budgeted at over €600,000, is already funded through a commitment from the Ministry of Environment. With financing secured and the planning phase in motion, the public tender for the project’s design is expected to be launched later this year.
Although the Iberian Agreement signed last year promised 60 hectometres of water from the Guadiana River – half intended for eastern Algarve via Pomarão – the other half remains stored in Alqueva, unable to reach the western Algarve due to the lack of infrastructure, the association says in a statement. This new development aims to resolve that impasse, it adds.
While AMAL has not gone into the specifics of how the water transfer will work, Portugal’s Minister for Environment, Maria da Graça Carvalho, explained last year that the idea would be for water to be channelled first to the Mira Basin, namely the Santa Clara dam in Odemira, Beja, and the onto the Bravura dam, north of Lagos. Whether the connection will be extended to other dams in the Algarve remains to be clarified.
Despite the unusually rainy winter and early spring which helped replenish water levels in the Algarve’s dams, local and national authorities are still pressing on with projects designed to increase the region’s water resilience, well-aware that coming winters and springs might not be so generous.
The headlining project remains the polarising desalination plant in Albufeira – maligned by many for its potential negative environmental impacts and defended by others, namely successive governments, as a necessity. Also moving forward is a project to supply the Algarve with water collected from the Guadiana River at Pomarão.
