Mértola, Portugal, May 8, 2025 - Portugal's Alentejo and Algarve regions, in the south of the country, have enough water for the next two years, after an unusually wet winter, but there is nevertheless a need to "speed up works" already underway to improve the sector's infrastructure, the country's minister of the environment and energy, Maria da Graça Carvalho, stressed on Thursday.
Speaking to journalists in Mértola, in the district of Beja, the minister said that the rainy winter in Portugal was just "an episode" and that everyone in the country must "be prepared for long periods without rain" - as has happened in the recent past.
"All the data we have from the last eight years shows that the amount of rain in the south of the Iberian Peninsula, namely Andalusia [in Spain], the Algarve and the Alentejo, has been decreasing and that's [what] we have to be prepared for in the future," she emphasised.
Carvalho was speaking to journalists at the end of a bilateral meeting of the plenary council of the Euroregion Alentejo - Algarve - Andalusia (EuroAAA) held on Thursday in Mértola.
The minister noted that although the Alentejo and Algarve regions currently have enough water stored for two years’ use, this is not a cue to "switch off" from this problem of water supply and drought.
We need to "continue to speed up the works we have underway [to] reduce water losses" - namely the Pomarão water intake for the Algarve, the desalination plant in Albufeira, and the water connection between the western and eastern Algarve, she specified.
The EuroAAA meeting, which was also attended by the president of the government of Andalusia, Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, took place at the Mértola Biological Station.
The stated aim of the meeting was to "deepen dialogue in strategic areas such as water resource management, biodiversity and energy, with a focus on common challenges and opportunities for collaboration to promote sustainable development in the southern region of the Iberian Peninsula."
Regarding the new Lower Guadiana Strategy, the minister said that this was the result of co-operation between the three EuroAAA regions, in which the River Guadiana - which forms much of the border between the two countries in this region - is a link that unites them and has several dimensions.
"There's the environmental dimension, biodiversity, the preservation of the river, the naturalisation of the river banks, but there's also the transport part, making this river more navigable [and] the need to do some work in relation to [its] desilting," she argued.
The meeting also made it possible to analyse the Euroregion's 2023/2024 activity report and to mark the passing of the EuroAAA presidency to the Algarve, which is to hold it until 2027.
The presidency of this working community rotates for two-year periods between each of the regions.
ASYS/ARO // ARO.
Lusa
