The Gaia City Council and the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia have signed a cooperation agreement aimed at attracting investment for a 300-hectare “new city” and an eight-hectare urban entertainment park.
The memorandum of understanding, signed on Friday (January 23, 2026) in Vila Nova de Gaia (Porto), by the mayor, Luís Filipe Menezes, and the representative of the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, Fahad Alabdulsalam, establishes a three-year strategic partnership focused on urban planning, mobility, digital transformation, municipal security, and crisis management, among other areas.
Speaking to Lusa, Luís Filipe Menezes - who previously headed the Arab-Portuguese Chamber of Commerce and Industry - revealed that the most ambitious project involves the creation of a “new city” within the municipality, covering an area of 300 hectares near the CREP (Porto Regional Ring Road or A41) and the transport links to the district of Aveiro.
“We want to have a large urban area with three aspects: housing, services - where we aspire to have a ‘technopark’ [technology park] - and construction. It will be the great solution to get people to live in the interior, and foreign investment will be essential there,” said the mayor.
Menezes highlighted the “surprising interest” of Saudi investors in the housing sector, adding that various types of housing are being considered, not just affordable housing.
To make this goal feasible and increase the interest of Saudi Arabian investors, the municipality is willing to grant public land, in a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) model, which aims to speed up the project's implementation in view of the strictly public financing deadlines.
“If we do it strictly on a public basis, we can seek investment and support from the government or the European Union, but it will always be a slower project, obviously. If we can secure an investment partnership that allows us to get the project off the ground at once, with a view to sharing the operating profits, it will be faster,” he explained.
Revision of the PDM completed this summer
This urban expansion is being coordinated with the revision of the Municipal Master Plan (PDM), which the local authority expects to have completed by the end of the summer.
The document should provide the necessary legal support for land use conversion, allowing the implementation of the new development model that the mayor believes is the solution, particularly for housing problems.
In terms of mobility, the mayor adds that the protocol opens the door to the participation of Saudi companies and authorities in the development of “new transport systems,” including urban cable cars—inspired by the model recently inaugurated in Paris—and road interface parks.
This partnership also opens the door to the creation of an eight-hectare urban entertainment park, inspired by the Tivoli Gardens, located in the middle of Copenhagen.
“We have the land and the space, we need investors to develop the country's first urban entertainment park. (...) It will be a space with outdoor culture, restaurants, and leisure linked to new technologies and artificial intelligence,” explained Menezes, declining to reveal the exact location to avoid “real estate speculation.”
“It's a bit of a dream of mine, which is the dream we have, and we need investors to develop the largest or the first urban entertainment park in the country. (...) We are developing this project. We have well-located land, in fact we have two options for well-located land. Our choice is for it to be very urban so that people can walk or take the subway,” he said.
According to the document signed this morning, the cooperation between Gaia and that Saudi province also provides for the exchange of best practices in digital transformation, waste management, and heritage preservation, favoring the PPP model to accelerate the execution of projects.
The memorandum does not impose immediate financial obligations, functioning as a “good faith” framework to facilitate the licensing and execution of qualified investments in the municipality.
Image credits: © Mathis Bogens | Unsplash
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
