Despite general advice for everyone to stay away from Portugal’s cliffs and beaches, a Brazilian man has died under a rock fall that also left a German teenager badly injured.The wounded woman was airlifted from a remote beach in the Sintra area and flown to hospital but the 23-year-old man, Marcos Augusto Oliveira Santos, having suffered head injuries from the falling rocks, died when he lay, despite attempts by an emergency medical team to resuscitate him.
The injured German 18-year-old was flown to the Hospital de São José, in Lisbon where she is in a serious condition but said to be “stable.”
The victims were part of a group of five people who were camping under the cliff on the hard-to-access beach despite the risk of rock fall, turbulent seas and continuing high winds.
The other three people in the party suffered light injuries and are receiving psychological assistance.
The commander of the Port Authority of Cascais said that the cliffs above the beach already had been identified as "unstable" due to wave and rain action in recent weeks, however, the sign warning of unstable condtions was not in place.
".. at the moment it is not there. I can not say if it was the bad weather, if it was vandalised, or anything else," said the commander of the Cascais Port Authority, adding that, "from Ursa beach to Cabo da Roca there are about ten signs warning of the risk of rock falls," but at the access to Ursa beach there was no such signage.
"We were on site with technicians from the Portuguese Environment Agency and the Civil Protection Authority from Sintra, responsible for the placement and maintenance of the signs and the warning was not there," said the Captain.