Ten Years After the Flood That Swamped Albufeira's Old Town, the State Takes Over Its 46 Million Euro Drainage Plan
The environment agency will now run the plan the council drew up after the November 2015 flood. Its centrepiece, a 1.5 km tunnel to carry the stream straight to the sea, is now costed at 33 million euros, more than double the first estimate.
Almost eleven years after floodwater rose to 1.80 metres in the lower town of Albufeira, the government has taken charge of the drainage scheme meant to stop it happening again. The Agência Portuguesa do Ambiente (Portuguese Environment Agency, APA) will run the Albufeira general drainage plan, at a cost of 46 million euros, the Environment Minister, Maria da Graça Carvalho, announced on Wednesday, as reported by the Lusa news agency.
The plan is being done "in collaboration with the council, but it is being directed by the APA", the minister told reporters in Quarteira, in the neighbouring council of Loulé. She called it "a big project, perhaps one of the biggest in the country" apart from Lisbon's. The money will come from Sustentável 2030, the EU programme for climate and sustainability works funded by the Cohesion Fund.
A tunnel to the sea
The main work is a 1.5 kilometre tunnel to divert the Albufeira stream away from the low-lying centre and carry its water straight into the Atlantic. The APA president, José Pimenta Machado, put its cost at 33 million euros, more than double the 15 million euros estimated for it ten years ago. It still has to go through an environmental impact assessment, and no start date was given.
The plan was the council's answer to the storm of 1 November 2015, which flooded shops and streets in the old town. It was drawn up by a team led by José Saldanha Matos, a professor at the Instituto Superior Técnico (Lisbon's engineering school) who had worked on Lisbon's own drainage solution, and presented at the town hall in 2016. The council said then that the tunnel would be about 5 metres in diameter and that the whole plan could cost 30 to 40 million euros. The mayor at the time said he wanted to start "tomorrow", but the tunnel never went ahead.
Some pieces were built. The Praça dos Pescadores pumping station and a western collector for rainwater around Cerro Grande are finished. An eastern collector is still to come, as well as the tunnel.
Water pipes and beaches
The minister set out other Algarve spending on the same visit. On Wednesday afternoon in Faro she was due to sign the first 3.7 million euro payment from the Fundo Ambiental (Environmental Fund) for smart water management. Those projects are paid 40 percent by the fund and the rest by the Algarve 2030 regional programme, with 120 million euros of investment planned by 2028. The aim is to cut the water lost from public supply networks from 20 percent to 15 percent, in a region that has lived through years of drought and restrictions.
About 32 million euros is planned for the coast of Loulé, Faro, Portimão, Lagos and Albufeira, Pimenta Machado said: replenishing beaches with sand, shoring up cliffs and rebuilding the groynes at Quarteira to slow erosion.
Albufeira has clashed with the state over water before, when the council fought the desalination plant planned on its coast.
Sources: the minister's and the APA president's statements in Quarteira on 30 September 2026, as reported by Lusa (via Observador); Albufeira Municipal Council, "Plano de drenagem de Albufeira foi apresentado" (the 2016 presentation, in Portuguese).
Feature image: Praia dos Pescadores, beside Albufeira's old town. Photo by Kolforn (CC BY 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
