According to a notice from the Portuguese Environment Agency (APA), cited by Lusa, the Environmental Compliance Report for the Implementation Project (RECAPE) will be open for public consultation “for 15 business days, from June 8 [Monday] to June 29, 2026, on the Participa portal.”
At issue are subsections 4 and 5 of the Porto - Oiã (Oliveira do Bairro, Aveiro) section of the Porto - Lisbon high-speed line, whose implementation project was not approved by the APA in December due to the concessionaire’s intention to relocate the Gaia station to Vilar do Paraíso and to build two separate bridges over the Douro River instead of a combined road-rail bridge, as had always been planned.
On March 31, the vice president of Infraestruturas de Portugal (IP), Carlos Fernandes, expressed his satisfaction that Santo Ovídio was returning as the definitive solution for the Gaia high-speed station, acknowledging an “incident” with the concessionaire AVAN Norte (Mota-Engil, Serena, Teixeira Duarte, Casais, Alves Ribeiro, Conduril, and Gabriel Couto), which wanted to relocate it to Vilar do Paraíso.
On April 7, Miguel Pinto Luz, Minister of Infrastructure and Housing, told Parliament that “there will be no delay” in construction of the first section of the Porto-Lisbon high-speed rail line, which is scheduled to begin this year and be completed in 2030.
The minister also noted that, should the 2030 deadline not be met, there will be penalties for the concessionaire AVAN Norte, “starting with the immediate loss of availability payments required by the contract, specifically 100 million euros per year lost due to delays caused by the infrastructure’s unavailability.”
In December, the APA rejected the changes that the AVAN Norte consortium wanted to make to the high-speed line and, in addition to issues related to the bridge over the Douro or the Gaia station, also denied the consortium’s request to build a shorter tunnel section and, for the remaining portion under Vila Nova de Gaia, at a higher elevation than initially planned, which would lead to more surface demolitions (136 demolitions planned in Gaia and Porto, of which 109 are residential homes and 27 are businesses).
For the APA, if the Gaia station were located in Vilar do Paraíso, it would be “in a peripheral area” without “intermodal connections to other forms of public transportation.”
As for the construction of two bridges over the Douro instead of a combined road-rail bridge, the APA also notes that this was “another key element of the project that underwent significant changes in the Detailed Design compared to what was recommended in the Preliminary Study.”
The Porto City Council also noted, as early as April, regarding the integration into Porto and the Campanhã station, that AVAN Norte “presented an alternative solution to the one that had been put out to tender,” which “did not correspond to the project previously evaluated and validated by the municipality.”
The Gaia station in Santo Ovídio and the road-rail bridge had been planned since September 2022, when the high-speed line project was presented, but in April 2025, the consortium unilaterally submitted an alternative proposal contrary to the Preliminary Study, which was ultimately rejected by the APA, leading the consortium to now revert to the original project.
Photo credit: © Miguel Marques | Unsplash
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
