The shadow of boreholes in the territory
In May 2023, official records from the National Water Resources Information System pointed to the existence of 170 boreholes, 21 wells, seven ponds, and three springs officially cataloged in the municipality of Odemira alone. This figure, focused on a single local geography, contrasts with the spatial vastness of the region and illustrates the historical and continued dependence on private intakes to ensure daily agricultural activity in the face of the water needs of established crops.
To understand the scale of this distribution on the ground, the Portuguese Environment Agency publicly admitted in September 2023 that it had only two operational inspectors to cover a total area of 23,000 square kilometers throughout the Alentejo territory. In practice, this proportion represents one inspector for every 11,500 square kilometers of territory, an inspection density that makes rigorous and continuous monitoring of all existing underground intakes difficult.
This territorial reality highlights the distance between the legal framework and the effective capacity for physical control of groundwater bodies. While intensive and super-intensive agricultural projects continue to expand across Alentejo sub-regions, the institutional inspection capacity remains limited by scarce human resources given the geographical vastness that needs to be monitored regularly.
The periphery of large-scale irrigation
Agricultural expansion was not strictly limited to the perimeters formally supplied by the public Alqueva network, generating transition zones where parallel intakes proliferate. According to a study published in May 2023 by the Sustainable Earth System Association, areas with unauthorized irrigation and illegal boreholes located in the direct zone of influence of the enterprise reached about 6,500 hectares during that period.
To contextualize this territorial dimension, these 6,500 hectares of unauthorized intakes corresponded, in 2023, to the fifth largest irrigation perimeter counted in the entire Alentejo region, scaling the significant weight that marginal or informal agriculture holds in the regional water panorama. Faced with this proliferation, the Alqueva Development and Infrastructure Company began formalizing complaints with the Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development only as of March 2022.
However, the reporting and control mechanisms operated by EDIA until 2023 managed to report only about 35% of the total area identified with illegal water intakes and use on the periphery of the system. This percentage leaves unexplained the destination and inspection of the remaining 65% of the surface with parallel uses detected in the same area of influence of the country's largest hydraulic development.
The weight of olive and almond groves
The pressure exerted on the water resources of the Alentejo territory finds a strong correlation in the structural change in the type of crops installed over the last two decades. According to the 2020 agricultural yearbook of the Alqueva Development and Infrastructure Company, intensive and super-intensive olive groves represented 67% of the 120,000 hectares of irrigated land supplied by the public enterprise that year.
This dominant expression of olive groves in 2020 translated into a fivefold multiplication of the registered area compared to the values measured in 2012, profoundly altering the seasonal water demand of the agricultural territory. This growth was joined by the accelerated expansion of other high-consumption crops, such as intensive almond farming, which in 2020 already represented 13% of the total irrigated area under EDIA's jurisdiction.
In terms of temporal growth comparisons, the almond crop represented in 2020 an expansion of sixteen times compared to the values measured in 2015. This crop dynamism required a constant readjustment of the volumes made available, culminating in the update approved by the Government in January 2026, which raised the maximum annual volume of Alqueva water allocated to different uses from 620 to 730 cubic hectometers per year.
The apparent abundance of the public network
O Meu Concelho
The most obvious and common reading suggests that the existence of a vast public irrigation network, with an area reaching approximately 130,000 hectares in July 2026 according to EDIA, completely eliminates the need to resort to private groundwater intakes. The linear reasoning assumes that, with reservoir water available to supply the large irrigation blocks, super-intensive farms would completely refrain from resorting to local or underground boreholes.
However, institutional data contradict this assumption of public network exclusivity, revealing that pressure on aquifers remains active in parallel. A report by the Agriculture Inspectorate-General released in July 2024 pointed to Alentejo and the Center as the regions of the country with the highest number of municipalities with groundwater intakes for human consumption that do not comply with the law on the protection of water resources.
The persistence of irregular intakes and the use of complementary boreholes show that the Alqueva infrastructure, despite its size in 2026, does not fully absorb the water voracity demanded by super-intensive farming models. Seasonal factors, such as the classification of the period between March and June 2026 as dry by IPMA due to reduced precipitation and high evapotranspiration, frequently force farmers to seek supplementary sources when public allocations suffer restrictions or adjustments foreseen in annual plans.
Signs of recovery and new demands
The evolution of underground water table levels presents mixed signs that demonstrate the volatility of water resources in the Alentejo region. According to data released by the Portuguese Environment Agency in May 2026, the analysis carried out at 313 observation points distributed across 54 groundwater bodies indicated that the majority showed levels close to or above the historical average recorded for the period.
This point recovery even led the Alentejo Hydrographic Region Administration to publish, through Notice no. 000073-ARHALT of May 2026, the lifting of the restriction on the licensing of new groundwater intakes in the Moura-Ficalho aquifer. The decision was based on the significant recovery of levels observed specifically during the 2025/2026 hydrological year, allowing the resumption of the issuance of new Water Resource Use Titles.
However, the Portuguese Environment Agency itself underlined in May 2026 that this recovery is neither homogeneous nor structural, with situations of high vulnerability remaining in several areas of the territory. As a regulatory counterpart, the new titles issued became conditioned on the mandatory installation of level sensors with teletransmission and automatic reporting of captured volumes, transferring to digital the scrutiny of an exploitation that continues to test the limits of local aquifers.