Castelo Branco, Portugal, May 18, 2026 (Lusa) - Consultation and assessment reports for two solar plant projects in the Beira Baixa region of central Portugal have confirmed severe structural impacts on the landscape, vindicating the concerns local residents raised, a citizens’ movement announced on Monday.
In a statement sent to Lusa, the Tagus International Natural Park Defence Platform said that the Portuguese Environment Agency has now made public the assessment and consultation reports relating to the Sophia solar power plant and Beira solar power plant projects, “following months of public pressure, civil society protests and a formal complaint lodged with the Commission for Access to Administrative Documents”.
In the statement, the platform added that these documents “identify permanent and irreversible impacts on the land and highlight structural problems relating to the landscape, soils, water resources, biodiversity, spatial planning and ecological fragmentation”.
Furthermore, the movement emphasised that the assessment commissions warned of a growing industrialisation and artificiality of Beira Baixa, highlighting the danger of permanent and irreversible effects.
"The Environment Agency documents confirm the serious structural impacts of the projects in Beira Baixa," the platform said, adding that an analysis of the official documents revealed conclusions of immense public relevance, confirming the concerns the public, civic movements, experts, and local stakeholders have been expressing for months.
The platform accused authorities of aggravating the situation by concealing the reports from the public for months, despite the documents being available to the project developer, reaffirming that the documents now made available "clearly demonstrate [that] civil society’s concerns were neither unfounded nor merely emotional".
"They are now confirmed by the official technical documents from the environmental assessment process, making it clear that the multitude of large-scale energy projects in the region can no longer be analysed in isolation," the organisation, which brings together environmental associations and civic movements, said.
It added that technical bodies and various contributions submitted during the public consultation “expressly advocated for the conduct of an integrated Strategic Environmental Assessment for the entire region”.
In the case of the Sophia project, an investment of around €590 million in the district of Castelo Branco, the assessment committee said that a “significant reduction in the scale of the project would be necessary for the impacts to even be potentially minimised”.
Meanwhile, the Beira plant proposed the installation of 425,600 solar panels with a total capacity of 266 megawatts (MW), covering an area of 524.4 hectares across the regions of Castelo Branco and Idanha-a-Nova, in central Portugal.
According to the platform, the consultation reports also showed that thousands of citizens had, during the public participation process, “identified the exact risks now confirmed by official opinions, including impacts on water resources, biodiversity, the landscape, the microclimate, and temperature trends”.
“Equally of enormous political significance is also the explicit recognition of the extraordinary public participation. In the Sophia process alone, 12,693 submissions were made, one of the largest public mobilisations ever seen in an environmental procedure in Portugal,” the platform said.
In light of the documents now available, the civic platform is demanding a genuine Strategic Environmental Assessment for Beira Baixa to evaluate the cumulative impacts of all energy projects and their associated infrastructure, alongside guarantees of full transparency and timely access to environmental information.
On 6 May, during a protest in Castelo Branco that drew around 100 people demanding transparency over the two solar plants, it was revealed that the Environment Agency had rejected both projects, though no written information had been published on the 'Participa' portal at the time.
The assessment committee coordinated by the Environment Agency rejected the Beira photovoltaic plant project after identifying significant negative impacts on ecological systems and land use.
Regarding the Sophia project, in February, the environmental authority announced that it had identified “significant and very significant negative impacts”.
JLS/MYAL // AYLS
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