Évora seen from the south, the cathedral rising above the city's white houses and terracotta roofs

Real Estate 12 September 2026

Évora is planning 7,000 new homes and a health cluster (and wants your comments by 12 October)

The revised Évora urban plan proposes more than seven thousand dwellings, a health cluster beside the new hospital and fresh business areas. Anyone can file comments until 12 October.

Évora opened its consultation on Monday and it stays open until 12 October. The revised Urban Plan for the city is now public, and any person or organisation can read it and respond.

What is proposed is substantial: more than 7,000 new dwellings, a health cluster next to the hospital still under construction, and new land set aside for economic activity. Mayor Carlos Zorrinho called it a plan for the coming decade, built so the city can break what he described as a certain urban stagnation.

The funnel problem

One idea in the plan stands on its own, whatever you make of the housing numbers. Zorrinho wants to rebalance the urban fabric and undo what he calls a funnel — nearly all business and industrial activity sitting on one side of the city, nearly all the housing on the other. Anyone who commutes across Évora each morning will recognise the shape of it.

The mayor also says some of the planned dwellings would use models designed to make construction cheaper and more attractive, without saying which.

How to have your say

The notice published in the official gazette sets out three routes: post to the council, email to cmevora@cm-evora.pt, or hand delivery at the council’s urban planning and regeneration division. The plan documents can be consulted at that same division’s technical offices.

What happens next is the part that usually goes unexplained. Submissions are weighed politically, folded into the final version or not, and the document then goes to the council and, if approved, to the municipal assembly. Zorrinho conceded that the original target — publication in the gazette during October — will probably slip. The new aim is by the end of this year, or early next.

For context, the country as a whole is licensing less, not more: building permits fell 7.1% in the second quarter, with the Alentejo one of the few regions where licensed floor area grew. If renting in the region is on your mind, the 2027 rent update coefficient is already set at 2.56%.

Institutional information is published on the Évora city council website.

By Duarte Figueiredo

Image: Stegop / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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