In the US, court battles over public access to beaches have dragged on for decades; in Italy, the organisation Mare Libero has been fighting since 2019 against the privatisation of some of the country’s most stunning coastal destinations; in Greece, the “towel revolt” was the name given to a campaign launched in 2023, rallying against abuses by sun lounger concession holders. Now the battle has reached Portugal.
In Portugal, court cases disputing ownership of beaches or access to them are not unheard of. At least one has even resulted in a Supreme Court ruling, in June 2023, in favour of litigants claiming ownership of an area beside the Aveiro lagoon, in a judgment authored by João Cura Mariano, the court’s current president. Such cases are nevertheless rare.
That is why the claim by the current owners of Herdade da Comenda, in the Arrábida Natural Park, south of Lisbon, to ownership of five beaches has caused such astonishment and outrage, prompting public demonstrations. Their claim rests on the argument that their ownership predates the royal decree establishing the entire coastline as public domain, under the so-called Public Water Domain, a legal concept that extends beyond the sea and also covers inland waterways. The government has positioned itself clearly, and reaffirmed that the beaches are public.
In a country of vast sandy beaches, where, since the second half of the 19th century, beaches have increasingly established themselves as holiday destinations for all social classes, the idea of private, or even segregated, beaches, with areas closed to free access, seems bizarre from the outset.
Yet a recent discovery, prompted by public statements from Environment Minister Maria da Graça Carvalho and Portuguese Environment Agency president José Carlos Pimenta Machado has revealed that the public’s right to occupy, with towels and parasols, the sand in front of concession areas is in fact recognised. And yet, in practice, even with the authorities’ backing, beachgoers on some beaches are being ordered to move away from those spaces.
The same officials had already raised the issue last summer, in June 2025, when the minister, arguing that concession holders paid far too little to make money off of Portugal’s coastline, even spoke of “setting prices” for basic consumer goods such as water, coffee, and “basic sandwiches” sold there, before the statement was swiftly withdrawn.
The same question applies to properties which, much like the cases reported in the United States, obstruct or prevent access to beaches with fences, gates, or security guards. Once again, Portugal has discovered, through the minister and the APA president, that this happens, for example, at a campsite on the Alentejo coast, in Melides, which in recent years has reeled in the rich, the famous, and the royal. People seeking to access the shoreline were required to identify themselves before being allowed through.
Why, then, do those whose duty it is to inform, inspect, and act fail to inform, inspect, or act? Is it because they do not know, or because they do not want to know?
The same reasoning applies to the prohibitive prices charged for concessioned transport, such as ferries or “trains” to beaches, and for car parks built on public land. As the president of the Portuguese Bar Association, João Massano, told RTP, “the monarchy said in 1864 that everything was public, but you cannot say access is public and then have no access: how am I supposed to get there, by plane?”
What is certain is that, in Portugal as in many other countries, the problem begins with ignorance of the law, including among those whose job it is to enforce it, and continues with neglect and an absence of commitment to the public interest.
But that is clearly changing, in some places faster and more dramatically than in others.
Anyone familiar with the Italian, Greek, or Croatian coasts, with their generally small and often rocky coves, knows that the idea of a freely accessible beach cannot be taken for granted. Quite the opposite: private businesses commonly occupy almost every available patch of space, with staff, politely or otherwise, chasing away tourists who dare to lay down their towels near the sea, when there is even room to lay down a towel.
Italy is probably the European country where coastal concessions have gone furthest, partly because they have historically been allowed to pass down through families without public tender. Successive governments have repeatedly postponed and resisted ending the practice. The latest deadline for complying with European legislation is January 2027.
It was against this backdrop that the campaign for beach access led, in 2019, to the creation of a formal liberation movement: Mare Libero, meaning Free Sea.
As a statement published on the movement’s website on 1 August, signed by regional leader Silvia Mazzuca, a professor at the University of Calabria in Sicily, puts it, concessions, which occupy almost 43% of Italy’s coastline, rising to 90% and even 100% in some regions, have become a kind of “open-air condominium”, genuine “urban developments” which, like an infection that the biologist calls the “beach resort disease”, “continue to spread, row after row, parasol after parasol, like a housing estate stretching as far as the eye can see, without a garden, a square, a place to breathe.”
Instead of the sea air and the sound of waves, Mazzuca writes, holidaymakers find themselves pursued by the city, “treated as wallets to be emptied rather than people seeking wellbeing”; holidays, once a time for regeneration, have become “a consumerist performance”.
In a report published last July, the Guardian noted that these concessions, known in Italy as “lidos”, numbered an estimated 22,000 in a 2022 census. The price of sun loungers varies according to how close they are to the water, while various kinds of barriers, fences, nets and walls, can prevent non-paying visitors from even seeing what lies beyond, let alone reaching it.
Some of these sites resemble shopping centres, complete with clothing shops, tennis courts, and even swimming pools, alongside the usual bars and restaurants. It is a highly lucrative business, conducted largely in cash, making it, as the same source notes, particularly attractive to organised crime.
But, Mazzuca warns in the text cited above, “something is moving”. Two European Court of Justice rulings have declared the automatic renewal of Italian beach concessions incompatible with the 2006 European Directive, known as the Bolkestein Directive, which, in the name of free competition across the European Union, prevents commercial operating licences on public land from being automatically renewed and requires open tenders accessible to businesses from across the EU.
The rulings, the activist argues, create an opportunity to use properly designed public tenders to “return to citizens what has always belonged to them”.
In a 27-page document drawn up jointly with the National Environmental League and the Italian branch of the World Wildlife Fund, Mare Libero set out its proposal for how that restitution should work.
The idea, Silvia Mazzuca explains, is to enshrine the social role of beaches, where, she argues, “social life should be expressed through community, inclusion and respect for the environment, not through consumption and exclusion”.
Free beaches, “equipped with basic facilities — showers, toilets and shaded areas — should be the rule, not the exception,” she says. Maintenance of those beaches and facilities, she adds, should be funded by the public purse, because the public owns the resource and has a duty to protect it.
Private concession holders could still operate, but only as a limited and secondary option: providing additional paid services for those who want them, while complying strictly with the law, environmental standards and labour conditions, and ensuring that an appropriate proportion of each beach is returned to public use.
In Greece, the movement to liberate the beaches, popularly known as the “beach towel movement” or “towel revolt”, emerged in 2023 in response to abuses by concession holders. As in Italy, operators frequently occupy all the available space along the waterfront, despite the law stipulating that only 50% may be concessioned, a figure that falls to 30% in nature reserves, as is generally the case in Portugal.
It was, as one of the movement’s founders told the Guardian in 2023, a movement that began on the island of Paros and amounted to “a battle against illegality”.
The founder, 78-year-old Christos Georgousis, put it bluntly: once the state, with its police and coastguard, had proved incapable of dealing even with sun loungers, “we have to solve it ourselves”.
The public outcry spread across the country. The government and local authorities responded with inspections, fines and more than 20 arrests. One minister admitted that allowing businesses to take over beaches completely was tantamount to “shooting ourselves in the foot”.
But, as the British newspaper observed, many of the sun loungers removed before inspectors arrived were simply put back in exactly the same place afterwards, leading activists to conclude that the battle was far from over.
Keeping popular indignation and pressure alive is never easy. People disperse, they grow tired, life goes on.
Perhaps Albania is determined to prove otherwise. Since May, the country has been gripped by what has become known as the “flamingo revolution”, a popular uprising sparked by plans for a vast, multi-billion-euro tourism development, with more than 10,000 beds, linked to Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
The proposed resort is planned for an environmentally sensitive area that provides habitat for flamingos and other protected species. The protests have spread across the country, with huge demonstrations in the capital demanding the government’s resignation, and they have shown no sign of stopping.
Every day from seven in the evening, a march or demonstration takes place in Tirana.
What began as an uprising against the privatisation of a protected stretch of coastline has become something larger, as Elsa Paja, one of the demonstrators, told the Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso on 24 August: “We are here every day, communicating with one another, working with one another, organising ourselves. That is one of the great victories.”
Source: Fernanda Câncio - DN
Photo credit: Mário Rui André/LPP
