An ammonia leak in Matosinhos emptied a packed festival in the middle of the night
An ammonia leak at the Docapesca ice factory in the Port of Leixões forced the evacuation of around a thousand people from the opening night of Matosinhos' São Sebastião festival.
Opening night of the Grandiosas Festas do Mártir São Sebastião in Matosinhos ended early and badly: an ammonia leak at the Docapesca ice factory in the Port of Leixões forced the evacuation of the festival grounds just as the fishermen’s patron-saint celebrations were getting going, with around a thousand people on site.
What happened at the Docapesca plant in Matosinhos?
The alert came at 10:55pm on Friday, after an explosion in a refrigeration unit at the ice factory released ammonia — a toxic, corrosive gas used in industrial cooling systems. Authorities cleared the festival grounds next door and assembled a response that, by 2am, still counted more than forty emergency personnel and eighteen vehicles. One person suffered light injuries.
Was the ammonia leak brought under control?
The gas dispersion was reported as controlled during the early hours, but Civil Protection stayed cautious about reopening the area, without guaranteeing when it could be used again — official guidance for incidents like this lives on the Civil Protection site. The festival committee, for its part, stressed that the situation was fully controlled by the authorities, and Docapesca, which manages Portugal’s fishing infrastructure, keeps its information on its official site.
The timing stings: the São Sebastião festival is one of the best-loved dates on the Matosinhos calendar, and its opening clashed with a packed weekend across the country, as we showed in our weekend guide. If the programme continues in the coming days, it will be with one eye on the stage and the other on the air readings — and the rare certainty that, this time, the smell of sea salt really was the least of anyone’s worries.
Image: prilfish from Vienna, Austria / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
