Portugal’s south has water in reservoirs for two or three years

The south of the country has enough water stored to last “two to three years”, with all dams “literally full”, said the president of the Portuguese Environment Agency (APA), acknowledging that national records could be broken in reservoirs.

“I have no doubt that in two to three years, from the point of view of water quantity, we will be completely relaxed. We have literally full dams”, José Pimenta Machado told Lusa, estimating that by the end of February Portugal will break the record for water stored in the country. “We are not at 100% because we are releasing water”, he noted.

According to the APA’s weekly reservoir bulletin, last Monday mainland Portugal had 12,610 cubic hectometres of water stored, 95% of total capacity. The reservoir with the least water, the Arade (a river that flows into Portimão), was at 74%.

Speaking to the Lusa news agency, Pimenta Machado pointed out that the country had experienced a “truly exceptional situation”, with persistent rains affecting “from Bragança to Faro” in the wake of the storms that had hit the country in recent weeks. “It was the whole country. I don’t remember all the river basins being full”, he said.

He pointed out that the situation in the south is very different from that in the north, but in the succession of storms, the area that normally has less water, the south, was equally affected.

Pimenta Machado pointed to a case that clearly illustrates this reality, the Monte da Rocha dam, which “all Portuguese people know for having no water”, and which this week was discharging surface water because it was “completely full”.

The Monte da Rocha dam, in the municipality of Ourique, in the Alentejo region, had only filled up in 2011 this century, but the following years were dry. Comparing the data for February 2018, it was at 8% of capacity, and in 2021 it reached 29.4%. Last year it was at 14.5% and in 2024 at 12.1%.

“The same thing as Campilhas, the same thing as the reservoirs in the Algarve”, said the APA president, recalling that in 2024 the dams in the Algarve had water for five months. The data indicates that Campilhas, Santiago do Cacém, Alentejo, has not exceeded 40% in the last decade (in 2017) and in February 2022, in the middle of winter, it was at 4%.

In Santa Clara, on the Mira River, Odemira, it has fluctuated in recent years between 66% and 33%, “and is currently full”.

In Bravura, in the municipality of Lagos, the maximum recorded in February over the last 10 years was 34.1% in 2022. Two years ago, it was at 12.5%. In Castro Marim, another dam, Odeleite, has never filled up in the last decade.

This year, all the reservoirs are full, which demonstrates the “exceptional nature” of what the country has been through, with the situation now calmer and the rivers returning to their beds. Pimenta Machado acknowledged that this period “was not easy”. “From a professional point of view, I have never experienced such a difficult time”, he said.

Even in the Algarve, good management of the Arade and Funcho dams in the Arade basin was necessary. “As far as I can remember, the Arade has not had water since 2018. The Arade had to discharge water for several days in a row”, he noted.

The Chança River, a tributary of the Guadiana on the Spanish side, also reached 1,100 cubic metres per second. “I don’t remember ever having discharged into the Guadiana, which had flows at the mouth of around 6,000 cubic metres per second”, he pointed out.

Pimenta Machado recalled that the storms entered from the Atlantic, affected Portugal and then moved on to Spain, and from the Spanish basins the water returned to Portugal, a difficulty compounded by the “additional difficulty” of snow (which turned into water and flowed into the rivers), especially the Mondego and Zêzere.

“We always have great difficulty understanding the significance of the thaw for the river’s flow”, he said, recalling that last summer’s fires also had an influence, as in the Açor mountains, where fragile vegetation and soils that did not retain water worsened the situation.