Wild boar and deer now cause over a thousand road crashes a year in Portugal
Collisions with wild boar, deer and other ungulates on roads managed by Infraestruturas de Portugal went from under 20 a year in 2015 to more than 140 in 2025. Nationwide, the annual total has passed a thousand.
If you drive inland roads at night and have had that moment where a dark shape crosses your headlights, that was not bad luck. That was statistics. Collisions with wild boar, deer and other ungulates on roads managed by Infraestruturas de Portugal have gone from fewer than 20 a year up to 2015 to more than 140 in 2025 — and across the whole country, counting every road, the annual total has already passed a thousand.
The agency’s records start in 2010, when monitoring began, and add up to 856 collisions since. The overwhelming majority, 762, involved wild boar. Coimbra and Viseu stand out as particularly bad districts.
Why are there so many wild boar collisions?
Two things stacking on top of each other. The first is genuine: the wild boar population has expanded sharply across the country, moving into areas where it barely appeared before, including semi-urban fringes. The second is bookkeeping: far more information is collected and reported now than a decade ago, so part of the rise is better counting rather than simply more animals.
What can actually be done about it?
There is a project under way trying to map how ungulate populations are evolving and to test ways of reducing their impact, both on the roads and in agriculture — where damage to vineyards and crops already costs real money. The known fixes are fencing on critical stretches, wildlife crossings, adapted signage and hunting management, and none of them works on its own.
For drivers, the practical rule is dull but effective: slow down where wildlife signs appear, especially at dawn and dusk, and assume that behind one boar there is another. If a collision is coming, don’t swerve into oncoming traffic — hitting the animal is almost always less serious than the crash that follows the swerve. Network maps and emergency contacts are on the Infraestruturas de Portugal site.
A thousand crashes a year is not yet a national crisis. But it is a line that has only gone up for fifteen years, and nobody has bent it yet.
Image: Wilrooij / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
