MONCHIQUE WITHOUT A FUTURE.

Sewage fraud and environmental destruction end up in the European Court of Justice.

Monchique/Algarve. The wastewater from the municipality of Monchique is treated at the Companheira wastewater treatment plant, near Portimão, 27 km away. But what happens to the wastewater from Fornalha, Escravatadouro and the other villages in the municipality?

How can a local authority send a monthly bill to homeowners charging them for sewage treatment that it does not actually provide because the houses cannot technically be connected to the municipal sewage system? The Monchique Municipal Council is the local authority responsible for supplying citizens with drinking water and the treatment of their wastewater (in actual practice and not just on paper in the invoice), and it charges for this service even though around a third of all buildings in the borough are not connected to the municipal sewage system because there are no pipes leading to the treatment plant. Many houses only have a septic tank instead, in which the sewage is not treated in accordance with EU legislation on hygiene and public health. The excuse given by an administrative employee, namely that every resident is entitled to have their full septic tank pumped out twice a year, is completely irrelevant. And this doesn’t even include the excrement from intensive pig farming.

ECO123 online asked the council’s Socialist Mayor, Paulo Alves, how this all fits together. How can a municipality issue an invoice for a service it does not even provide? In the free economy, such brazenly false accounting is called fraud. The mayor and his ‘chief of staff’ Victor Santos have yet to provide an answer to this question. Avoiding giving any direct response is also a kind of answer when things start to become uncomfortable. And things are getting uncomfortable now, because the EU Commission is suing Portugal for sloppiness in its wastewater treatment.

Monchique is thus in illustrious company with at least 62 other municipalities in Portugal that are now facing proceedings before the Court of Justice of the European Union for failing to comply with EU regulations on the treatment of their municipal wastewater. This measure was announced after the Commission had discovered in 2022 that the country was not ensuring adequate treatment of its wastewater, thereby endangering public health, animal health and the environmental quality of its lakes, rivers, soil, coastal waters and groundwater.

The Commission has already requested Portugal to comply with EU regulations on several occasions, but without any visible result. In its letter (INFR(2022)2028), the Commission calls on the country to comply with the requirements of the Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive (91/271/EEC). Under this directive, towns and municipalities are obliged to provide the necessary infrastructure for the collection and treatment of their urban wastewater. However, Monchique, a mountainous region in the Algarve, has not yet managed to connect all of its houses to the municipal wastewater treatment system due to its notoriously empty coffers. Due to the many forest fires, Monchique has fallen victim to a decline in its population, accompanied by rising administrative costs. The municipality’s deficit in recent years has been a staggering 80%, which is only offset by the contributions provided by the central government in Lisbon. In 1990, Monchique had 12,500 inhabitants, but now there are currently fewer than 5,000 inhabitants who still see a future in Monchique. The rural exodus of young people is just one of the municipality’s many problems.

However, the European Green Deal, with its zero-pollution target, calls for air, water and soil pollution to be reduced to levels that are no longer considered harmful to human health and natural ecosystems, in order to create a low-toxicity environment and strengthen collective resilience. The animal disease leishmaniasis is just one of the insidious deadly diseases that affect pets in the district of Monchique, because stagnant sewage at summer temperatures of up to 40 degrees Celsius favours the spread of the mosquito larvae that transmit the disease…

Biodiversity destroyed by eucalyptus monocultures

The European Commission has also announced that it will take Portugal to the European Court of Justice for failing to implement nature reserves. Brussels accuses the country of licensing plans and projects that affect REDE NATURA 2000 areas. [See the discussion of PTCON 003729 in the November and 6 December 2025 issues of ECO 123: https://eco123.info/short-stories/rede-natura-2000-ptcon-0037-monchique/ ]. The EU also states that special conservation areas are not being properly protected and assessed by the ICNF. In the Commission’s view, this gap in the national legislation jeopardises the protection of areas that are of fundamental importance for biodiversity in Europe. Over the course of one generation, for example, the Monchique Mountains Nature Reserve, with its highly diverse forest, was transformed into an economic area with eucalyptus monocultures under the terms of EU Commission certificate PTCON 0037, resulting in several severe and large-scale forest fires…