Olhão council is entering the private property market, as the mayor announces a €1 million spend on buying houses in the old part of the city, doing them up and renting or selling them to young couples.
The typical Levant and Barreta areas of the city, for decades ignored totally by successive administrations, have become the favourite zones for what the council describes as ‘foreign investors.’
The idea, says mayor António Pina, is to keep "the soul" of these neighbourhoods which already are undergoing a multi-million euro transformation with hundreds of crumbling, unwanted buildings being renovated with private capital at zero cost to the council or to ratepayers.
"Tourism has very good things, it generates jobs and even better incomes. But there is also its reverse. Right in the historic area, much sought after by foreigners to purchase and renovate homes. They are welcome, but we have to be careful in the medium/term so that these areas are not decharacterised from the point of view of the resident and local populations," Pina said in an interview with Sul Informação.
The council, "will use this million euros to buy some houses that are still abandoned, to repair them and then rent them or sell them to young couples in Olhão."
Young married couples living in the municipality for ten years or more may apply to live in these houses.
This is just one of the measures that the re-elected mayor, António Pina and his team have planned for the four years ahead.
One of the key areas long ignored by the council is basic sanitation, one of the city’s inexcusable problems which has been discussed at length while the sewage continues to flow from beneath the city into the Ria Formosa lagoon.
“Six million euros worth of works are already underway,” crows the mayor who lists non-city centre areas that are to get some investment, including the island of Armona, where there are 940 properties.
The main and long-standing problem is the discharge of sewage through the rainwater drainage system under the city centre. This has added to the situation that has given Olhão the well-deserved reputation intermittently of smelling of sewage.
This is the sewage that ends up in the Ria Formosa, "a challenge,” says Pina, “that we must try to solve by the end of this mandate," conveniently forgetting his promises four years ago urgently to sort out this problem with a special fund being set aside for the necessary work.
"We have already reduced illegal sewage discharges into the rainwater drainage network by about 20%. But this is a meticulous and costly job as we are talking about a network that has been laid down over the years. But this is an investment that we have to make, because our riverside front, especially with the investments that will be made, is not in line with illegal sewage flows," explained the mayor, outlining the major criticism of his previous four year mandate.
As for the new waste water treatment plant in the open countryside between Olhão and Faro, this is halfway finished and when it is commissioned, the old sewage farm can be decommissioned, which should cut down on the smell a bit.
When this happens, "we will make an environmental recovery intervention in the old sewage settlement ponds and throughout that area, for public enjoyment and bird watching," said Pina.
