New Lisbon Airport (

Portuguese Portuguese may refer to: * anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal ** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods ** Portuguese language, a Romance language *** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language ** Portu ...

: ''Novo Aeroporto de Lisboa'', NAL) is the currently planned site for construction of a new

Lisbon Lisbon (; pt, Lisboa ) is the capital and largest city of Portugal, with an estimated population of 544,851 within its administrative limits in an area of 100.05 km2. Grande Lisboa, Lisbon's urban area extends beyond the city's administr ...

Airport to serve the Center and South of

Portugal Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic ( pt, República Portuguesa, links=yes ), is a country whose mainland is located on the Iberian Peninsula of Southwestern Europe, and whose territory also includes the Atlantic archipelagos of ...

, scheduled to complement the current

Portela Airport Humberto Delgado Airport , informally Lisbon Airport and formally Portela Airport, is an international airport located northeast of the city centre of Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. The airport is the main international gateway to Portugal. ...

as Lisbon's main airport

History

After years of debate and public consultation whether Rio Frio or Ota would be the place to build a new Lisbon airport, a new location was proposed in Alcochete and won as it was more accessible given the good infrastructure nearby, such as the

Vasco da Gama Bridge The Vasco da Gama Bridge ( pt, Ponte Vasco da Gama; ) is a cable-stayed bridge flanked by viaducts that spans the Tagus River in Parque das Nações in Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. It is the second longest bridge in Europe, after the Cri ...

. The location of Alcochete as the construction site of the future Lisbon Airport was confirmed by the Portuguese Government on 8 May 2008. The estimated cost for the project is €3 billion (approximately US$4.5 billion). Construction started in late 2010 but, in May 2010, forced by the

financial crisis A financial crisis is any of a broad variety of situations in which some financial assets suddenly lose a large part of their nominal value. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many financial crises were associated with banking panics, and man ...

, Prime Minister

José Sócrates José Sócrates Carvalho Pinto de Sousa, GCIH (born 6 September 1957), commonly known as José Sócrates (), is a Portuguese politician who was the prime minister of Portugal from 12 March 2005 to 21 June 2011. For the second half of 2007, he ...

put the project on hold. The green field facility envisaged in the 2000s was to have four runways, and was expected to service over 50 million passengers annually. After the termination of the new airport project, a plan was later put forward to keep the existing airport in service, but also convert the preexisting Naval Air Base in Montijo into a facility for low cost carriers. In November 2018, at an

IATA The International Air Transport Association (IATA ) is a trade association of the world's airlines founded in 1945. IATA has been described as a cartel since, in addition to setting technical standards for airlines, IATA also organized tariff ...

congress in Madrid, Pedro Marques, Minister of Planning and Infrastructure, stated that Montijo airport would start operating by 2022. French construction group Vinci, which owns

ANA Aeroportos de Portugal ANA Aeroportos de Portugal is the airport authority of Portugal. The authority manages various airports including Portugal's largest airport, Lisbon Airport. The authority has its head office in Building 120 on the grounds of the airport. Histor ...

, said in 2019 it would invest 1.15 billion euros ($1.39 billion) in the expansion of Lisbon's main airport and the construction of the new one. On 31 October 2019, the

declared that operations for low cost airlines would begin in 2021. In March 2021, Portugal's aviation regulator ANAC rejected the evaluation request submitted by ANA, citing disagreements with the municipalities in and around the new airport as well as environmental concerns. As of 2019, the conversion of Montijo Airforce Base into a civilian airport for

low-cost airlines A low-cost carrier or low-cost airline (occasionally referred to as '' no-frills'', ''budget'' or '' discount carrier'' or ''airline'', and abbreviated as ''LCC'') is an airline that is operated with an especially high emphasis on minimizing op ...

is targeted to be completed around December 2022.

References

{{authority control Airports in Portugal Proposed airports Proposed transport infrastructure in Portugal