The economy of Évora and the public money that reaches the municipality outside the council

In brief

What does the municipality of Évora produce, what public money reaches it outside the council, through whose hands, and how much of it is late? This study brings together the municipality's statistics (the accounts of its enterprises, foreign trade, tourism, the population and work series), the large investments on record, the recovery-plan money attributed to the municipality, public contracts, the Tribunal de Contas audit catalogue and the funding doors open in August 2026.

Évora is a relatively prosperous municipality in a region below the national average: the 2023 purchasing-power index puts the municipality at 111.5 and its region at 93.9, with the national average at one hundred. The 7 907 enterprises based in the municipality generated €576 491 544 of value added in 2024 (what they produced minus what they bought in order to produce). The recovery plan attributes €167 372 756 to the municipality, of which €86 944 669 was paid in the snapshot of 2026-08-19, and most of it goes through bodies that are not the council.

What this project concludes

The outside money does not go through the council. Of the recovery-plan money contracted in the municipality, the Universidade de Évora holds €38 596 976 and the municipality €12 069 013, and those who administer it are national agencies. Questions about this total go more often to the national bodies and to the university than to the town hall.

The delay shows in the money, and the dates do not disprove it. The overdue project locations carry 61.32% of the value approved for the municipality, and the completion dates that would soften that reading are the frailest field in the register: 1 011 of the 1 445 on-time locations end exactly on their planned date. Two large promises stand still with nothing paid: the Malagueira student residence and the heavy medical equipment for the new central hospital of the Alentejo.

The economy is concentrated, and each person employed by the municipality's enterprises generates less value added than in the country. Four enterprises hold 21.5% of the municipality's enterprise value added, against 2.6% in the country; value added per person employed is €23 004, against €31 900 in the country; and the aeronautics cluster exports far more than it generates in the municipality. The purchasing-power index puts the municipality above the national average and value added per person employed puts it below, but they are different measures of different populations (those who live in the municipality, in one case, and those who work for the enterprises based there, in the other), and they do not say how much the municipality consumes.

The town fared well on the national indices, which moved with the country's tides and not with a council's. Registered unemployment at the end of December fell from 3 720 in 2013 to 1 596 in 2024, and tourist nights went from 312 696 in 2011 to 709 328 in 2024. The series that ends below where it started is purchasing power, which went from 118.65 in 2009 to 111.47 in 2023.

The searchable audit trail is thinnest where the money is thickest: in the four families of the audit catalogue that were read, nothing published after 2019 names Évora in its title or abstract, and those are the years in which the recovery-plan money moved.

What the documents do not allow anyone to know: a gross domestic product for the town, which does not exist; a European Union figure per municipality, which does not exist either; and what the Tribunal de Contas concluded about Évora's money, because the catalogue indexes abstracts and not the reports.

What could work better

The public registers being joined by the tax number of the entities, which the recovery-plan register already carries in its rows and which the contracts search and the audit catalogue do not return. The recovery-plan register keeping the history of its daily snapshots. And that register's completion dates saying whether they were observed or filled in by convention.

This part is O Estado do País's reading from the documents of this study, and from them alone; every sentence points to a section of the document. The quoted facts are in the sections that follow, with the document and the page.

The limits of this document

• There is no GDP figure for the city. National accounts stop at NUTS3 — Alentejo Central, 14 municipalities of which Évora is one. What exists at concelho level is the business register: the accounts of enterprises headquartered in the concelho (INE's SCIE). Enterprise GVA is not municipal GDP: it misses public administration, most of the university and the hospital, and it credits a firm's whole activity to its head-office concelho.
• A call counts as reachable when its programme is the Alentejo regional programme or a national one. National avisos can still restrict territory inside the PDF; the count is therefore an upper bound on what an Évora actor can apply to. Who-can-apply classes come from the eligibility sections of the Fund Access Register, of 2026-08-08.
• Investment values are contract values, not audited outturn. The Embraer and Mecachrome figures are what the State's own resolutions and the institutions' pages print — what was committed, not a measure of what the plants are worth today.
• Several dates coexist. Business structure is 2024 (INE's most recent SCIE year), trade and tourism reach 2025, the municipality's average monthly earnings reach 2024 in the table of series and the comparison with the national average stays at 2022, and funding doors are 2026-08-10.
• The section on the unexplored room is inference. Everything before it is a sourced fact.
• A snapshot. Calls close continuously — three of the doors listed were already inside their final month on 2026-08-10.

The Tribunal de Contas catalogue read here covers 4 of the Tribunal's product families rather than all of them.

The contracts section is an upper bound on a truncated window. Portal BASE holds 24 436 contracts for the concelho of Évora. 600 of them are the most recently published ones, spanning 2026-05-08 to 2026-08-04. A contract carried out across several municipalities is returned by each of their filters at its full value, so a concelho contract total is an upper bound and concelho totals must never be added together.

There is no EU figure for a municipality. The finest geography the EU's project-level data reaches for Portugal is the NUTS3 region. That is a null.

The frame: a city above its region

58 567 people lived in the concelho in 2025 (up from 55 711 in 2021). The surrounding NUTS3 region, Alentejo Central, produced a GDP of €3554.5 million in 2024 (provisional), which is 1.2% of the country's output — €23 164 per head against €27 063 nationally, or 85.6 on a Portugal-equals-100 scale, and 70.5 against the EU-27 average in purchasing-power terms, which is the value per inhabitant compared with the EU average, set at one hundred, after discounting the differences in prices between countries.

The city itself sits above the national average on the one indicator that exists at concelho level: INE's 2023 purchasing-power index puts Évora at 111.5 (Portugal = 100), while its own region stands at 93.9. Évora is a relatively prosperous city inside a region below the national average.

Population, work, enterprises and visitors

These series are national statistics, not municipal accounts. They are printed by mandate boundary and attributed to nobody. Registered unemployment is the December stock published by the employment institute, not an annual average. Average monthly earnings are the ministry's earnings survey, published through the statistics institute.

Four cautions.

The population series steps up between 2020 and 2021 and keeps climbing after it. Municipal population estimates before 2011 exist only on a superseded geographical base and are not comparable, which is why 2009 and 2010 are empty.

The enterprise count changes statistical vintage between 2022 and 2023, when the territorial classification changed, and no overlap year is published at municipal level to measure the break.

The tourist-nights series covers a universe of establishments that broadened during the early 2010s as rural and local accommodation were brought in, so the early values are not strictly comparable with the later ones. Municipal figures before 2011 do not exist in any published indicator.

Average monthly earnings are drawn from three successive indicator vintages, which agree to rounding in their overlap years.

Purchasing power per inhabitant is published every second year, so it has its own short table. It is an index with the national average at one hundred.

What Évora's firms generate

The 7 907 enterprises headquartered in the concelho employed 25 061 people in 2024, turned over €1 833 280 534, and generated €576 491 544 of gross value added — 10.5% above 2023 in nominal terms (2023: €521 625 136).

GVA per person employed was €23 004, against €31 900 for Portugal as a whole — the productivity gap that a €1 282 mean monthly wage (2022, national mean: €1 362) already suggested.

By CAE section, of 15 sections with published values:

Manufacturing is the largest single block of enterprise value added in the concelho. Within it, CAE division 30 — fabrication of other transport equipment, the aeronautics plants' own division — shows €24 573 447 of GVA and 914 employed in 2024. Limit 1: SCIE attributes by company seat and by the firm's principal activity, and a plant-level picture is exactly what a municipality-level business register cannot promise.

Concentration is the structural fact. The four largest enterprises hold 21.5% of all enterprise GVA in the concelho, 23.4% of turnover and 21.0% of employment — the same four-firm GVA measure for Portugal as a whole is 2.6%. The size structure behind it: 7 605 micro-enterprises, 255 small, 39 medium and 8 large firms. In 2025 the concelho registered 259 new incorporations against 67 dissolutions (236 and 79 in 2024).

Trade: an exporting city

Goods exports from the concelho reached €598 367 742 in 2025 — 6.7% above 2022 — against €320 553 925 of imports. Two chapters of the nomenclature carry a combined 68.0% of everything the concelho sells abroad:

Chapter 88 — aircraft and their parts — at €199 951 040 is the aerospace cluster's export signature; chapter 85 is the electrical and electronics industry. The third chapter is live animals, the Alentejo's oldest trade.

Tourism: recovered past 2019, and about to be tested

739 187 nights were spent in the concelho's tourist accommodation in 2025 — 12.1% above the pre-pandemic 2019 figure of 659 561 — by 440 694 guests, 46.1% of them non-resident. Total accommodation revenue was €53 779 000 in 2025 (2023: €47 593 000). Tourism intensity, at 1261.1 nights per hundred residents, is well above the national 719 — but the stay is short: 1.7 nights per guest on average. People come, and they pass through. The European Capital of Culture year, 2027, is the stress test ahead.

Who has put serious money in

Aeronautics. The cluster began as a State decision: on 23 September 2008 the Portuguese State signed two investment contracts with Embraer for two plants in Évora — €117 143 105 for metallic structures and €52 281 430 for composites, €169 424 535 combined, the values printed in Resolução do Conselho de Ministros n.º 69/2010. In May 2022 Aernnova concluded the acquisition of both plants, which its own announcement puts at 500 employees. Mecachrome followed the anchor: a State investment contract signed on 3 February 2016 for a plant of around €30 million producing titanium aircraft-engine parts, financed in part by a €40 million European Investment Bank loan under the Investment Plan for Europe. The 2014-2020 EU cycle backed all three plants' expansion: €11 847 881 of ERDF money for the metallic plant's DESIAM project, €11 125 982 for the composites plant's DESi2COMP, and €10 924 905 for Mecachrome's production unit (EU register values, located to NUTS3, not concelho).

Health. The new central hospital — the Hospital Central do Alentejo — drew €40 000 000 of ERDF money for its outpatient block in the 2014-2020 cycle (EU register, NUTS3). The heavy medical equipment for the same hospital has approved recovery-plan money and, in the snapshot of 2026-08-19, nothing paid, as the section on the recovery plan shows.

Knowledge. The Universidade de Évora reports 9 106 students and 311 research projects in execution on its own numbers page; the PACT science and technology park carried an ERDF project of €4 355 421 in the 2014-2020 cycle. Under the PRR, the New Space Portugal mobilising agenda has €9 792 916 of its approved money attributed to Évora locations.

Culture. The money of the 2027 European Capital of Culture is in its own study, with the documents each value comes from.

The municipality. The Município de Évora's 2026 budget, approved on 22 January 2026, is in the study The accounts of the Câmara de Évora, 2010 to 2025. The industrial land offer, PITE, spans 500 000 m² gross; the municipal pages publish its lot structure but no occupancy rate.

No Council of Ministers resolution 2023-2026 approves a new contractual-regime investment located in Évora — the recent AICEP contract batches name Sines, Estarreja, Boticas, Portalegre and Rio Maior, not Évora. A widely reported Lauak plant for Évora is traceable to no primary source and its Portuguese plants sit elsewhere; a reported green hydrogen project and a light-aircraft factory remain press-only. The last State-contracted industrial anchor is a decade old.

What was promised, and what was paid

The Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência publishes a full-refresh snapshot every day, with no version history: yesterday's file is simply gone from the source. The snapshot carries the reference date 2026-08-19.

The register republishes daily without history, and each reading keeps the values of its day. The values of this study are those of the snapshot of 2026-08-19; the same register was also read on 2026-08-07:

An earlier edition of the accounts study printed the 2026-08-19 values with the date 2026-08-04, which is the date of the first version of the recovery-plan study and not that of the snapshot; the address of the file read carries the date 2026-08-19. What the register said on the days without a reading is left unknown, because the previous day's file disappears from the source.

They come from the manager layer of the beneficiaries file — the Beneficiário Intermediário and Beneficiário Direto rows — which gives exactly one row per project-location and carries both the approved and the paid amount for that location. The count of those rows, 398 747, equals the row count of the geographic distribution file exactly: the layer decomposes the money once and only once.

The percentage share column in the locations file lands €1 169 from the same approved figure, which is four-decimal rounding in the published share and nothing else. The other share column in that same file, the one that looks like a per-location payment share, repeats the project-wide payment ratio on every row, and reading it as a share inflates Évora's paid figure by an order of magnitude.

Nationally the same basis gives €24 491 396 628 approved and €14 299 597 753 paid across 397 030 projects, an execution rate of 58.39%. Évora holds 0.68% of the national approved total and executes it below the national rate. One thing to know about that denominator: €3 655 353 461 of the national total — 14.93% of it — belongs to no concelho at all, recorded as national or with no location, so the share of place-attributable money is slightly larger than the figure above.

Where the promise sits

There is no component column in the projects file; the component is the prefix of the investment code, and it is the only key available. Évora's project locations fall under 13 of the programme's 21 components.

Component names come from the publisher's own investments file.

Investimento e inovação is the largest single block of approved money in Évora, and it has paid out under half of it. Infraestruturas reaches the concelho through a single project-location, and that is nevertheless where the most money actually paid sits: one road programme has moved €29 061 019 through Évora, more than health, housing and culture together (€17 860 225). And a count of locations is not a measure of size. Eficiência energética em edifícios has 1 009 of them for €2 631 788 approved, an average of €2 608 per location.

The five largest project-locations

The "concelhos" column is the reason a municipal figure needs care: the road programme at the top of that table is spread across 17 municipalities and the research alliance across 19. What appears in Évora's total is the Évora share of each, from the beneficiaries file rather than apportioned.

Who holds the money, and who receives it

The same euros can be counted through two different layers, and the two must never be added together: the recipient layer is a second view of the same money, not a component of it. It is also not a complete view.

The recipient layer falls €30 759 762 short of the manager layer on money paid. That gap is not leakage: it is money on projects contracted directly, which carry no final-beneficiary row at all. Most of it is one item — the road programme's €29 061 019, whose manager appears in no final-recipient row.

IAPMEI - AGÊNCIA PARA A COMPETITIVIDADE E INOVAÇÃO, I.P. is the largest single holder of Évora's approved PRR money at €39 036 811 contracted and €21 784 396 paid — and it is a national agency that passes money on, not a recipient. INFRAESTRUTURAS DE PORTUGAL, S.A. holds €29 684 101 and has been paid €29 061 019, the single largest disbursement in the concelho.

The six above are the largest of 22 manager-layer bodies; the other 16 are national agencies and funds holding smaller amounts. The source returns 23 rows rather than 22, because one body holds Évora money under two different roles — a count of rows here is not a count of bodies.

Among the 1 823 final recipients, the university is the largest final recipient on both measures — contracted and paid. The seven largest by amount contracted:

The municipality itself is not the main channel for PRR money in its own territory (inference, from the two tables above: the câmara appears in the recipient layer with less contracted than the university, and not at all in the manager layer). A reader looking for "what the council did with the money" would be looking at the wrong actor for most of this total.

A third layer, suppliers, exists with 6 entities. It does not reconcile to project totals and its location column means something different.

What "on time" means in this data, and what is overdue

Status stands at the snapshot's own reference date, not today's, because that is the date the source speaks for.

1 011 of the 1 445 locations counted as on time record an actual completion date falling exactly on the planned date — 69.97% of them. A modal difference of zero at that scale is more consistent with a field being closed out administratively than with delivery being observed and dated (inference). The remaining 434 locations record an actual date earlier than the planned one, and the same doubt about how these fields are filled applies to them too.

Two things sharpen that reading, and one of them stops it being a criticism of Évora. First, 470 of those exact matches are rows where the start date, the planned completion date and the actual completion date are all the same day. A project cannot be observed to begin and finish on one date at that scale, so those rows record a filing convention rather than an observed date (inference). All of them sit in a single investment line. Second, the pattern is national, not local: across the country 177 241 of 246 545 on-time locations carry the same exact-date stamp, 71.89%, which is slightly higher than Évora's. The register's completion dates cannot be read as observed delivery anywhere. So the on-time count is soft evidence, and quoting it bare would overstate punctuality by a wide margin.

The overdue group is the one that reads as a broken promise: a planned completion date already passed at the snapshot date, with no actual completion date recorded. In Évora that is 608 project-locations carrying €102 624 704 of approved money — 61.32% of everything approved for the concelho — of which €41 693 864 has been paid.

It is concentrated. Habitação has 39 project-locations in Évora, all of them past their planned date with nothing recorded as delivered: every one of them overdue. Two of the five largest project-locations in the concelho are in that state and have received nothing at all — the student residence at €7 483 162 approved and €0 paid, and the hospital equipment purchase at €5 314 868 approved and €0 paid.

The equipment is for the new central hospital of the Alentejo; the money is approved, the planned date has passed, and nothing has been disbursed (inference: the source records approval, date and payment, and does not say why).

Public contracts

Portal BASE is Portugal's public contracts register. Recovery-plan grants and contract prices are different quantities.

That sum is an upper bound on a truncated window and nothing more. They are 600 because the register has an undocumented firewall that IP-bans on volume, and the server caps a page at far fewer rows than it is asked for.

The national total stands at 2 390 229 contracts and the concelho filter returns 24 436, so it restricts; a deliberately invalid concelho identifier returns 0 rows, so it does not fail open; and the 3 largest contracts read were checked against their own execution-place field, which exists only on the per-contract endpoint. All three read «Portugal, Évora, Évora».

The largest contracts in the window:

And the entities doing the contracting. Each row below is one spelling, not one body:

The first two rows are the same hospital group under two spellings — and there is a third in the same window. Grouping the 600 records by body rather than by string gives 56 contracting bodies, of which 5 file under more than one name. The hospital accounts for 3 of those spellings and, taken together, 282 contracts worth €29 580 141 — which makes health the most active contracting entity in the window. The waste utility files under 3 spellings for 23 contracts. The municipality files under 2, giving 45 contracts worth €1 975 150 rather than the 39 its main spelling shows.

The grouping rule is not the register's: fold accents, drop punctuation, drop the trailing legal-form abbreviation. The rule under-merges — the intermunicipal community in the table above files under its acronym and, twice, under the same name without it, which the rule does not join because the acronym survives normalisation. Together those are 14 contracts worth €735 681. Nothing available can distinguish an acronym prefix from a genuinely different body. So 5 is a floor on how many bodies file under more than one name, not a count. That is the shape of this whole register: a per-string count looks like a per-entity count and is not one.

Across the two sources, the same institutions recur in a different order, and one of them is easy to lose. The hospital is the largest contracting entity in the window above; in the recovery-plan data it appears under a different name, HOSPITAL DO ESPÍRITO SANTO DE ÉVORA, E.P.E., with €7 746 863 contracted and €563 527 paid. A join on entity names across the two registers would have missed it (inference — the two registers use different names for what the contract objects themselves confirm is one body; nothing in either source states that they are the same entity).

What was audited

The Tribunal de Contas publishes a catalogue — the title and abstract of each report — and separately the reports themselves as PDFs. The catalogue carries 2 206 documents across 4 product families, spanning 1997 to 2026. Those 4 are not everything the Tribunal publishes.

Place, in this source, is free text. There is no entity field, no concelho field, no NUTS field: a municipality reaches an audit only as words in a sentence. So matching is string matching. Across these 4 families, 6 documents name Évora, and only one is about the municipality itself — a count that is a floor, not a total.

These matches fall into two of the four confidence tiers: 1 document where the name follows a municipal designator such as Município de, and 5 where it is a bare mention. The parish tier holds 0 of them, and so does the tier for names belonging to a longer municipality. Reported as "6 audits of Évora", the count would be 6 times the truth: the other 5 are the university on its own account twice, a sector report covering four universities, the hospital, and a museum works contract.

The one municipal document is not filed among the Tribunal's audit reports at all: its product family is Relatórios de Verificação Interna de Contas, the internal verification of a body's accounts for one financial year. Its subject is «Município de Évora - Gerência de 2016». The catalogue records the family and the title, and nothing more.

There is nothing since the 2019 report in these four families that names Évora.

Why a silence here is not a silence

Two blind spots.

The four families are not the Tribunal's output. They are four of the product families it publishes. A fifth — Relatórios de Apuramento de Responsabilidades, 192 documents — contains 2 reports whose subject is the Município de Évora itself:

• Relatório nº 1/2016 - 1ª Secção — «Auditoria ao Município de Évora para o apuramento de responsabilidade financeira sancionatória identificada no âmbito do contrato de abertura de crédito na modalidade de “curto prazo” outorgado com o Millennium BCP»
• Relatório nº 8/2013 - ARF — «Contrato de empreitada “Conceção/Construção da Escola EB1/JI dos Canaviais” celebrado entre o Município de Évora e o Consórcio “Ecociaf – Construção Civil e Obras Públicas, Lda. e Certar – Sociedade de Construções, S.A.” (Processo de fiscalização Prévia nº 1968/2009)»

So the true count of catalogued Tribunal documents about this municipality is at least three, not one, and the four-family search cannot see two of them.

The catalogue indexes abstracts, not report bodies. A thematic audit of how mainland municipalities fund their fire brigades carries no mention of Évora in its catalogue entry at all — and names the concelho 13 times in its own text, including its position in the Tribunal's own tables.

In the four families, nothing published after 2019 names Évora in its title or abstract.

Évora is an unusually clean name to search for: 0 structural risks against it, that is, no structural over-match risk. It is not one of the two Portuguese municipality names that belong to two places at once, and it is not a whole word inside a longer municipality's name. The gazetteer is INE's own live list of 308 municipalities. Names that fail those tests behave very differently — a search for "Guarda" in this catalogue returns the national guard, not the city.

The money side's names, in the audit catalogue

The only join the source allows is a join on words.

The housing institute is in that table twice. Under the name the recovery-plan register gives it, the catalogue returns 0. Under its acronym the catalogue returns 2 — the Tribunal writes Instituto de Habitação e Reabilitação Urbana, without the two «da»s the other register uses, so an exact-token match sees two different bodies. The first number is a false zero. The same fragility runs the other way in the table above: the Tribunal's own 2008 abstract writes «Universidade do Évora», which the university's correct name does not match, so the university's count of 2 is itself one short of the documents that name it.

A zero in that table is therefore a weak signal, three times over. A name may be spelled differently, as here. The abstract may simply not name the body even when the report is about it, and the libraries themselves report holding more items than the interface hands back — 10 rows in total: 2 in the audit-reports library, 7 in external verification of accounts and 1 in internal verification, with the cause not established and paging failing to recover them. A nil result means "not found in the catalogue", never "not audited".

The hospital's name fragment "Espírito Santo" returns 8 documents, of which 7 name the Hospital Divino Espírito Santo de Ponta Delgada — a different hospital, in the Azores. The words matched; the subject did not. Only one of the eight is the Évora hospital.

What the EU data cannot tell you

There is no EU figure for the concelho of Évora. The granularity does not exist in the source.

The EU's project-level dataset places 2 569 projects in the NUTS3 region containing Évora, which it names Alentejo Central. All 2 569 of them carry the programming period 2014-2020 — an earlier funding cycle, and a different instrument from the recovery plan. Putting the two side by side would be comparing different things. The dataset has no concelho field, and for Portugal the postal code is empty on every row.

The size of the aggregation problem is the point. Alentejo Central contains 14 municipalities, per INE's own geographic dimension: Alandroal, Arraiolos, Borba, Estremoz, Montemor-o-Novo, Mora, Mourão, Portel, Redondo, Reguengos de Monsaraz, Vendas Novas, Viana do Alentejo, Vila Viçosa, Évora. A figure for that region is a figure for all of them.

PRR publishes the older NUTS vintage — the same dimension carries 25 NUTS3 entries — while the EU project data uses a newer one. Both call the region Alentejo Central; the codes are not interchangeable, and passing one to the other returns zero rows with a perfectly healthy HTTP status.

The funding doors, as at 2026-08-10

This annex is the snapshot of one day, 2026-08-10, and it was not read again. On the date of this edition, 2026-09-30, the deadlines quoted up to 2026-09-09 have passed; the others stand as the sources wrote them on that day.

Across every system an Évora actor can reach, on 2026-08-10.

Portugal 2030

204 avisos were open nationally; 72 of them — worth €1 156 524 348 in allocations, counting for multi-region calls only the slices their reachable programmes reserve — belong to programmes an Évora actor can reach (limit 2: an upper bound). 28 are the Alentejo regional programme's own avisos, worth €186 749 100; multi-region national calls reserve further Alentejo slices on top. Since the 2026-08-08 register snapshot, 7 of its calls are no longer open — 5 of them removed from the portal's listing before their published closing dates — and 0 opened. By who-can-apply class, of the reachable calls: municipalities and local authorities can apply to 32, associations and non-profits to 39, companies to 16, universities and R&D bodies to 13 — and natural persons to 1. The nearest deadlines among reachable calls: «Capacitação de Atores e Redes – Parcerias para a Coesão não Urbanas - Alentejo» closing 2026-08-14, «RAM - Medidas de adaptação às alterações climáticas - 5.º Aviso» closing 2026-08-19, «Reabilitação da aerogare do aeródromo de São Jorge» closing 2026-08-20.

The systems Portugal 2030 does not cover

60 instruments across PEPAC/IFAP, PRR, IEFP, Turismo de Portugal, the Banco Português de Fomento, FCT, DGArtes and the EU's direct programmes; 44 were open or standing on 2026-08-10. What stands out, by actor:

For a farmer or landowner — PEPAC's currently open windows are all forestry, producer-organisation or phytosanitary calls (6); no agricultural productive-investment window was open, and the young-farmers period closed in December 2025. The annual Pedido Único direct payments run on their own calendar, and LEADER money flows through each territory's GAL.

For a company — the PRR's competitive windows are effectively over: 0 avisos verifiably open to new applications, on the programme's own 2026 avisos plan. What replaces them is credit and guarantees: the Banco Português de Fomento's standing lines (InvestEU guarantees, energy-resilience credit to 2026-12-31, decarbonisation, and the PT2030-guarantees line that advances part of an approved incentive), plus the Portugal 2030 company calls above.

For a tourism business — Turismo de Portugal keeps three standing or year-end doors: the Qualification of Supply line (up to 80% of eligible investment, ceiling €3 000 000 per project), the Crescer com o Turismo programme (€30 000 000 allocation, open to 2026-12-31, also open to the municipality and non-profits), and an interest-free €30 000 microcredit for low-density territories.

For an employer — IEFP's +Emprego pays 12 times the IAS (2026: €537.13) with uplifts for permanent hires of registered unemployed; applications run to 2026-12-15, and the job offer itself must be notified to IEFP by 2026-12-02. The 2026 internship windows (INICIAR, +Talento) closed in July and reopen on next year's calendar; disability-insertion internships and the geographic-mobility support are open all year.

For someone starting out alone — the near-absence of natural persons from Portugal 2030 (1 reachable call) is structural, not an oversight. The individual's doors are IEFP's own-employment measures backed by the Fomento MicroInvest line (credit to €20 000, Invest+ to €100 000) and, for social-economy entities, the €12 500 000 Social Investe line.

For the university and researchers — FCT had six calls open on 2026-08-10 (bilateral mobility with Germany and France, advanced computing, a health prize, Berkeley placements) with the big annual doors (PhD studentships, scientific employment, IC&DT projects) on published 2026-2027 calendars; the ERC Starting Grant 2027 closes 2026-10-14 (up to €1.5 million); the MSCA postdoctoral call (€399 million) closes 2026-09-09.

For culture — the Évora 2027 ecosystem — DGArtes has a call open until 2026-09-09 to create and run the Orquestra Regional do Alentejo: €1 620 000 over two years, restricted to cultural non-profit associations seated in the Alentejo. Creative Europe and the ALT2030 culture calls are the continuing doors.

EU direct — the EIC Accelerator's remaining 2026 cut-offs (September and November), Interreg Sudoe's open calls on wildfires and ageing, the LIFE 2026 calls, Erasmus+, and ESA's business-incubation network for space-tech start-ups — a natural fit for a city whose exports are one-third aircraft parts — are all live doors; their per-call detail lives on the EU portals.

Where the unexplored room is

The funding doors this section quotes are those of the annex, read on 2026-08-10; the deadlines up to 2026-09-09 have passed, as the annex says.

1. The aerospace cluster exports far more than it feeds locally. Chapter 88 alone exports €199 951 040, yet division 30 shows €24 573 447 of GVA and 914 jobs, and four firms hold 21.5% of all enterprise GVA. The gap between a world-scale export figure and a modest local value-added figure is what a thin supplier base looks like: machining, treatment, tooling, logistics and certification services around three anchor plants are the classic entry points, and the funding geometry fits — BPF guarantee lines are standing, the PT2030 company calls are open, and ESA BIC incubation exists precisely for that adjacency. The last State-contracted anchor is a decade old; the next tier was never contracted.

2. Tourism's constraint is the short stay, and the Capital of Culture year will test capacity it hasn't built. Intensity already runs well above the national average, yet the average guest stays 1.7 nights and total accommodation revenue is €53 779 000 — a pass-through profile, with 2027 about to multiply demand onto it. The doors are open now — Qualification of Supply to €3 000 000 per project, Crescer com o Turismo until end-2026 — and close before the demand peak arrives. Capacity and stay-lengthening investment made in 2026 meets the 2027 test; investment decided in 2027 does not.

3. Nobody has consolidated Évora 2027's money, which usually means nobody has consolidated its procurement either. The official pieces on record do not add to a programme budget (the study Évora 2027, European Capital of Culture sets them side by side, document by document), and the association's contracts flow through Portal BASE. For local firms (staging, production, accessibility works, hospitality), the ECoC's supply needs are a 2026-2027 revenue stream that the published doors barely describe. The DGArtes orchestra call (€1 620 000, deadline 2026-09-09) is the concrete, dated example.

4. The countryside's door is not where its money is. Agriculture generates €45 228 740 of enterprise GVA and €65 103 634 of live-animal exports, but PEPAC's open windows are forestry-only and Portugal 2030 structurally excludes farmers. On 2026-08-10, the windows open to an Évora landowner were the six forestry and ecosystem calls with deadlines between August and September 2026, and those deadlines have passed; it was money for the montado rather than for the herd. Anyone waiting for the next productive-investment or young-farmers window is waiting on IFAP's calendar, not on Portugal 2030's.

5. The city's own execution is the quiet constraint. €102 624 704 of PRR money attributed to Évora sits, in the snapshot of 2026-08-19, in overdue locations while the construction section already generates €49 641 927 of GVA with 2 106 workers. Deadlines (PRR closes 2026) turn unbuilt approvals into forfeited money; execution capacity — project management, licensed contractors, works supervision — is itself a market in Évora for exactly as long as the backlog exists.

6. The productivity gap is the compound finding. GVA per worker of €23 004 against €31 900 nationally, wages €1 282 against €1 362 (2022), a micro-enterprise base of 7 605 firms — and, at the same time, an above-average purchasing-power index of 111.5. The two measures are of different populations, and this study does not measure what explains the distance between them. The doors that act on the production side — innovation and qualification calls, research money through a university with 9 106 students, guarantee-backed investment credit — are the ones that are open.

Sources

• The municipality's statistics: INE's JSON API, for enterprises, foreign trade and tourism; investment values from the Diário da República, the European Union registers and the institutions' own pages; the funding doors from the managing bodies' portals, read on 2026-08-10.

• Municipal socioeconomic series — the statistics institute's municipal indicators for population, enterprises, tourist nights, purchasing power and municipal cultural spending; the employment institute's concelho files for registered unemployment; the ministry's earnings survey for average monthly earnings.

Gaps of the series. Municipal population and tourist-nights series do not exist before 2011.