Environment Minister Maria da Graça Carvalho, and the president of APA, the Portuguese Environment Agency, cancelled their scheduled visit to Évora at the last minute today after campaigners opposing three planned mega solar farms staged a protest outside the event.
There was widespread jubilation over social media.
The minister had been due to attend the launch of a waste separation campaign alongside APA officials, but both withdrew amid a demonstration organised by the civic movement Juntos pelo Divor (“Together for the Divor”).
According to regional broadcaster TDS (Rádio e Televisão do Sul), an APA representative who arrived at the venue ‘ahead of time’ was met by protesters, leading government and institutional officials to abandon their plans.
Campaign spokeswoman Ana Barbosa said the protest was intended to draw attention to what residents describe as the potentially devastating consequences of three contiguous photovoltaic projects planned north of Évora.
By cancelling participation, the minister has potentially scuppered what would have been glaring media focus on today’s evening news bulletins. As we write this text, the story has not appeared on the usual mainstream outlets, only on media stations local to Évora/ the Alentejo.
The solar projects, proposed for the Divor reservoir basin in the parish of Nossa Senhora da Graça do Divor, would have a combined installed capacity of more than 1,000 MW and occupy over 1,800 hectares of countryside.
Campaigners argue the projects would cause irreversible damage to biodiversity, agriculture and tourism while permanently transforming one of the Alentejo’s most distinctive landscapes.
The demonstration marks the latest escalation in a growing grassroots campaign against what critics describe as the industrialisation of the countryside in the name of the energy transition.
The dispute has already attracted national attention after heritage specialists warned that the projects could fundamentally alter the landscape surrounding Évora, whose historic centre has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986.
Architect Miguel Lima, a former regional director of Portugal’s architectural heritage authority, has warned that the city risks becoming an island in a “sea of glass”, arguing that covering thousands of hectares with photovoltaic panels would have a “catastrophic” impact on the setting that formed part of Évora’s UNESCO designation.
Lima has called for a dedicated heritage impact assessment before environmental licensing proceeds – saying the visual relationship between the city and its surrounding landscape is an integral part of its international heritage value.
Critics have also questioned the location of the projects because part of the land belongs to the Eugénio de Almeida Foundation, one of the region’s leading cultural and philanthropic institutions.
But developers have rejected suggestions that the solar farms threaten Évora’s World Heritage status, maintaining the projects are compatible with heritage protection and essential for Portugal’s renewable energy ambitions…
Sunday’s protest nevertheless underlined growing public resistance to large-scale renewable energy developments across rural Portugal. Campaigners say communities are increasingly concerned that vast solar installations are being approved without sufficient regard for local landscapes, biodiversity and/ or quality of life, arguing that projects designed to support Portugal’s energy transition — and the growing electricity demand from industries, including data centres, servicing interests well beyond those of Portugal — are coming at too high a cost for the regions expected to host them.
For activists gathered in Évora today, the cancellation of the minister’s visit was seen as an early symbolic victory in what they insist will be a long campaign to prevent the Divor valley from being transformed into one of Europe’s largest solar complexes.
Comments over social media were peppered with ‘bravos!’ and ‘congratulations to the movement’, and similar, showing that the government’s attempts to bring people onboard for a mass-embrace of renewable energy projects is not going according to plan.
Source material: Tribunaalentejo.pt
