The municipality of Almada reached in 2026 the highest water consumption in the last 75 years, with an increase of 4.3 percent in the first six months of this year compared to 2025, according to the city hall.
In a note published on its Facebook page, the Almada City Council (CMS), in the Setúbal district, points out that the 4.3 percent increase represents more than double the average annual growth of the last decades, which hovered around 2%.
However, the CMS emphasizes, this increase is not uniform across the entire municipality.
“While zones such as Pragal, Almada, Cacilhas or the Cova da Piedade saw consumption stabilize or even drop slightly, others surged: Charneca da Caparica grew more than 15%, Sobreda and Lazarim almost 15%, and the Costa de Caparica more than 14%,” according to the municipality.
These numbers, according to the municipality, “help to understand the pressure the supply system is feeling this year.”
In another post on the same page the CMS explains that the substantial increase in consumption during the hottest hours caused demand to exceed the volume of water that the Almada Municipal Water and Sanitation Services (SMAS) are able to extract daily from the intakes (wells).
For this reason, it states, “in order to safeguard the water supply to all homes and prevent those same localities from becoming overloaded, a model of shared and alternating distribution is underway,” a strategy that the municipality argues aims to regularize reserve levels across the entire Almada territory.
The CMS’s action plan involves operational intake, indicating that SMAS recently connected a new infrastructure, which is already producing at 100%, the activation of one more bore in the coming weeks, and regulatory processes for three boreholes and the technical design of three more.
This plan, the municipality adds, also includes the modernization of infrastructures with the expansion of storage reservoirs, the renewal of the distribution network, and the technical monitoring of the conduits remains active and uninterrupted, ensuring 24/7 continuous surveillance.
In recent days, residents of several areas of the municipality of Almada have reported successive water outages, and a petition has been launched that already has more than four thousand signatures, in which the petitioners demand urgent measures to minimize the impacts of the water shortage.
The petitioners also call for urgent intervention so that this problem is resolved as soon as possible and express themselves “deeply worried and outraged at the frequent interruptions in the water supply” that have affected part of the municipality, especially Costa da Caparica, Sobreda and Capuchos.
In the petition it is explained that “for several weeks thousands of residents and business owners have faced recurring water cuts, often for hours on end and frequently during critical times of the day, namely in the late afternoon and early evening, when most families return home and need to use this essential service.”
This situation, they say, has caused serious constraints for the population, hindering basic and indispensable daily activities, such as taking a shower or preparing meals, as well as the normal operation of commercial establishments.
The Regulatory Authority for Water and Waste (ERSAR) has asked for clarifications from the Almada Water and Sanitation Municipal Services (SMAS).
Following complaints to ERSAR, the regulator asked SMAS Almada for clarifications to ascertain the situation and the response given to users.
The Costa’s Future Movement, which ran in the last municipal elections, announced on Monday morning a protest gathering in front of SMAS Almada, while on social networks there is a notice of a silent human chain on July 8 in Costa da Caparica to urge urgent resolution of the water shortage.
