€11.2m to stop the Bravura's water disappearing before it reaches the fields
The DGADR contract, funded by Portugal's recovery plan, runs for 14 months across the Bravura reservoir, the Monte Velho tunnel and the main conveyance line. A second phase of around €40m has been announced but not dated.
The system that waters Alvor was built for a different century. It grew up around the Bravura dam, finished in 1958, to serve roughly 1,800 hectares, and it moves water along an open canal where evaporation and seepage take their cut over the whole route.
The work now under way changes that. Phase one of the Alvor irrigation modernisation is worth €11,199,674.06 and has a 14-month deadline, paid for through the strand of Portugal’s recovery and resilience plan that exists specifically to cut water losses in farming. The client is the Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development, with TPF Consultores as designer, Cimontubo as contractor and P3 supervising.
What the contract actually covers
Three work fronts: the Bravura reservoir, the installation of pipe inside the Monte Velho tunnel, and the main conveyance line. The approach is the same everywhere — instead of demolishing what exists, closed pipe goes in within the old structure. It is the first step in converting a free-surface canal system into a pressurised one, which is the difference between carrying water and leaking it.
The package the government set out on a site visit in late August is broader: about €15 million in total, taking in a reservoir, a pumping station, a filtration plant, two kilometres of upgraded main canal, and photovoltaic panels to power the pumps. Official estimates put the reduction in losses at around 60%, or roughly 19 million cubic metres a year.
Phase two exists on paper
Agriculture and Sea Minister José Manuel Fernandes confirmed the intention to proceed with a second phase, estimated at around €40 million. There is no start date and no confirmed funding, which in public works is the difference between an announcement and a schedule.
Keep the scale in view. The Algarve goes into every summer with Bravura among the country’s most depleted reservoirs, and the rest of the country has its own scares — in Almada last year, a burst main left thousands without water. Nineteen million cubic metres a year will not fix a drought. It fixes the part of the problem that is a choice: the water lost between the dam and the tree. The recovery plan paying for this has deadlines of its own.
Image: Bextrel / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
