Évora — what was budgeted, what was paid, and what is owed

The Município de Évora's own 2025 accounts, set against the state regulator's independent debt series and the national yardstick.

Four limits

The Prestação de Contas is management's account of the year. It is detailed, internally consistent and externally audited — but it is one voice. Two outside voices exist: the independent auditor's signed opinion (the Certificação Legal das Contas), and DGAL — the Direção-Geral das Autarquias Locais — which publishes, per municipality and per year, the same legal debt concept the report uses, compiled on the regulator's side.

A budget is not money. Évora's 2025 budget says €109 483 315source · Município de Évora after revisions; the money that actually arrived was €67 263 297source · Município de Évora. Reading the budget as spending is the single easiest way to be wrong about a municipality, and the gap here is not small.

The 2024 accounts were never certified. The auditor's 2025 opinion records that the previous year's accounts were rejected by the Câmara itself — 2source · Marques, Cruz & Associados votes in favour, 5source · Marques, Cruz & Associados against, in the meeting of 2025-05-28 — which forced a Declaration of Impossibility of Legal Certification for 2024. The 2024 comparatives are therefore the ones printed in the 2025 report, and they carry that history. The vote sits months before the October 2025 local elections.

The national yardstick is one year behind, and its full study is not public. The Anuário Financeiro dos Municípios Portugueses 2024 — an academic publication (CICF/IPCA, with the accountants' order), not a government source — openly publishes only its conclusions presentation, and its national debt table stops at accounts year 2023. DGAL's per-municipality file reaches 2024.

The year in four numbers

The budget, and what actually arrived

The initial 2025 budget was €104 000 000. One modifying revision — folding in the prior year's closing balance of €1 997 375 and budgeting €3 485 940 for the PRR-financed "Évora 2027" works — raised it by €5 483 315, to €109 483 315source · Município de Évora.

Against that, €67 263 297source · Município de Évora was collected. The execution rate, 61.44source · Município de Évora%, is the lowest in the report's own recital of recent years, and since 2021 the direction is one-way:

Two absences explain much of the 2025 gap, and the report names both. A revenue line of 5 million euros for "Évora 2027" saw no execution in the year. A technical-cooperation line of €5 013 000 — five million euros of it the protocol for road access to the new central Alentejo hospital — also saw none. Transfers from co-financed projects were budgeted at many times what arrived: €1 087 287 came in, an execution of 11.58% on that line. Budgeting money that outside bodies have not yet committed, and then not receiving it, is the recurring mechanism behind the falling execution series (inference; the report states each line, not the pattern).

This recital's window opens in 2018. The 2015 report carries 48.1% — a deeper trough, in the year after the bailout instalments — so execution collapses have followed Évora's debt crises before (inference).

The year closed with €2 381 077 in hand to carry into 2026.

Where the money came from

Current revenue — the money that funds the running of the municipality — was €58 217 063, an execution of 67.53% of its budget line. Its composition is the structural fact of Évora's finances:

The report's own words: an "excessive dependence" on State transfers, which are 47% of current revenue. Across the whole of the accounts, transfers from the State budget covered 50% of total spending in 2025 — the figure was 43% in 2022, dipped in 2023, and has risen each year since.

The four municipal taxes, for scale:

The "other current revenue" line is where the budget-versus-money gap is most extreme: €19 427 778 was budgeted there and €155 573 arrived — the report explains the line as the place where inherited debt had to be accommodated in the budget's arithmetic.

Capital revenue was €7 041 207 — an execution of 33.09% of its budget. Inside it: €5 018 370 of State capital transfers, €1 087 287 from co-financed projects, and €759 313 drawn from the investment loan signed in 2023 and cleared by the Tribunal de Contas in 2024.

Where it went

Current spending was €54 575 386, an execution of 70.64%. Two lines are 56% plus 34% of it:

Personnel executes at 96.55% because salaries are paid whether or not the rest of the budget happens; it is the incompressible core of the accounts. The goods-and-services line is where the large running contracts live — bulk water, sanitation, waste, public lighting — and it is also where the unpaid bills accumulate.

Capital spending was €10 989 664 — an execution of 34.10% — and its composition is the sharpest single fact in the accounts: of €24 159 745 budgeted for investment proper, the municipality managed to pay €5 104 307 — an execution of 21.13%. The report blames delays in PRR-expected projects and public tenders that attracted no bidders. Meanwhile €4 308 783 went out in loan repayments, at 93.64% of that budget line — the debt was serviced almost exactly as planned while investment ran at a fifth of its plan. Loan repayment is the one line of capital spending that cannot slip (inference; the report prints both rates without comparing them).

At year end, €25.7 million of commitments carried into 2026, of which €14.6 million were already invoiced and awaiting payment.

What the plan bought

The Grandes Opções do Plano — the plan layer of the accounts, investment plus the flagged activities — paid out €27 369 083 in 2025: €11 050 691 of investment (PPI) and €16 318 392 of plan-relevant current activity (AMR).

Inside the social block, housing and collective services — water, sanitation, waste — took €9 034 569, which is 33% of the whole plan. Debt operations took €4 365 266. Education's plan line was €1 735 315; the cultural, recreational and religious services line, €1 782 427. A city whose plan-money goes first to water, waste and debt service is a city paying for its infrastructure and its past before its ambitions (inference).

The debt, in three layers

Suppliers: the layer that is growing

Debt to suppliers ended 2025 at €19 821 418 — up €3 674 532 on the year, 22.76%. The layer to watch is inside it: ordinary current supplier debt went from €6 478 008 to €11 025 289 in one year — a rise of 70.20%. The report attributes it, in its own words, to the financial difficulties the municipality has felt especially since 2023. A quarter of that current debt is the monthly water invoice to Águas do Vale do Tejo alone. Beside it sit €5 642 725 of old water debt, restructured into two long-dated repayment plans whose creditor is now the European Investment Bank, and €3 153 404 owed to investment suppliers.

Two hard numbers measure the strain. The average time Évora takes to pay a supplier reached 137source · Município de Évora days — up 33 days in a year:

And for the second consecutive year the accounts close with formal arrears — pagamentos em atraso — of €4 976 172source · Município de Évora.

Banks: the layer that is legacy

Medium and long-term bank debt ended the year at €29 418 657, down €3 549 470 on the year, across seven loans and three banks. Its composition is its history: 49% refinances debt from the PAEL — the state's municipal financial-support programme — and 42% is the 2016 financial-recovery (saneamento financeiro) loan. Together the rescue-era loans are 91% of the bank debt; 6% funds new investment. Servicing all of it cost €5 365 896 in 2025 — €4 308 783 of principal and €1 057 113 of interest.

The total, against the legal ceiling

The legal measure — total debt of budgetary operations under Lei n.º 73/2013 — ended 2025 at €54 379 035source · Município de Évora: €54 261 280 the municipality's own, €117 754 its share of associated entities. The law caps that total at one and a half times the average net current revenue of the previous three years — for Évora, a ceiling of €82 571 687source · Município de Évora on an average of €55 047 791 — so 2025 closes in compliance, with €28 192 653source · Município de Évora of headroom.

Compliance today is the end of a much longer story, and the report's own four-year window cannot show it. The regulator's series can.

The regulator's series

DGAL publishes the same art. 52.º debt total, per municipality, from its own collection. Beside each figure: the debt index — the debt as a percentage of the three-year revenue average that defines the legal limit, where the ceiling is 150source · CICF/IPCA — Anuário Financeiro dos Municípios Portugueses%.

Évora spent the middle of the last decade far above the legal ceiling — the index opens at 242.6source · calculated% — and crossed back under it only in 2020. The index falls in every year of the table, even in 2020 when the euro amount itself ticked up — revenue grew faster. Ten years of paying down the rescue debt is the context for every number: for why investment executes at 21.13%, for why the plan's money goes to debt operations, and for why a €28 192 653source · Município de Évora margin is a genuine achievement rather than an accounting nicety (inference).

Two more things the regulator's file supports:

• Against the municipality's own 2024 figure, DGAL's 2024 figure differs by €926source · calculated — on a debt of fifty-four million, the two tellings agree to within a thousand euros. DGAL's file also carries its own 2024 ceiling for Évora, €77 764 656source · Direção-Geral das Autarquias Locais (DGAL), on the same legal formula.
• Across all 308 municipalities in the 2024 file, Évora's debt index sits at position 21 counted from the most indebted, and Évora is one of only 23 municipalities whose debt still exceeds their revenue average at all.

The national yardstick makes the same point from the other direction: the Anuário Financeiro's presentation — academic, not government, and for accounts year 2023 — puts the national municipal debt index at 39.8%, and counts 12 municipalities over the legal limit in 2023, a list on which Évora does not appear. Évora is legal, and it is also one of the most indebted municipalities in Portugal relative to its revenue. Both are true.

What the auditor signed — and what could not be signed

The Certificação Legal das Contas for 2025, signed 2026-04-17 by Marques, Cruz & Associados, SROC, is a clean opinion: the financial statements present the municipality's position truly and appropriately, and the budgetary statements comply with public-accounting norms. It carries emphases — matters flagged without qualifying the opinion: a bank reconciliation clean-up begun in 2025 and due to finish in 2026; the de-recognition of the low-voltage electricity-grid concession assets under a 2025 accounting instruction; some 2.8 million euros of creditor balances that are in substance non-current; and the existence of the arrears.

Under "other matters" sits the sentence with the longest shadow: the proposal for the 2024 accounts was rejected in the Câmara meeting of 2025-05-28 — 2source · Marques, Cruz & Associados votes in favour, 5source · Marques, Cruz & Associados against — and the auditor therefore issued a Declaration of Impossibility of Legal Certification for 2024. A year of this municipality's accounts exists without an external signature. The 2025 opinion being clean means the books recovered their external witness; it does not certify 2024 retroactively.

The books, briefly

Total assets are €212 967 096; total liabilities €63 735 757; net worth €149 231 339. The year's accrual result is a loss of €2 443 292, against a loss of €4 591 039 the year before — nearly halved. Before depreciation and financing the year is positive by €6 248 696. Total accrual income was €68 276 720 against €70 720 012 of expense. The municipal balance sheet is solvent many times over on paper; the pressure in these accounts has never been about net worth, it is about cash and time (inference).

The budget-balance rule of the finance law — current revenue must cover current spending plus average loan repayment — is met, with €6 151 351 to spare, as it has been in each year of the report's four-year window.

The money promised from outside

The recovery-plan register, on 2026-08-04, says: approved money attributed to the concelho of Évora, €167 372 756; paid, €86 944 669. That register republishes daily with no history, so those figures are that snapshot's.

Set against them, from these accounts: the municipality itself received €1 087 287 in co-financed capital transfers in all of 2025. The PRR money attributed to Évora overwhelmingly flows through entities other than the municipality — the university, the health service, housing bodies, national agencies — and the part that is the Câmara's to spend has, so far, mostly not arrived (inference).

What 2026 says it will do

The budget in force for 2026 totals €110 840 577 — larger again than 2025's. Inside it sits €3 984 060 for the "Évora 2027" works. Whether 2026's execution extends the falling series is the first thing to check when the 2026 accounts appear, roughly in the spring of 2027.

What to make of it

Évora budgeted €109 483 315source · Município de Évora, collected €67 263 297source · Município de Évora, and paid €65 565 050source · Município de Évora. Half of what it spends arrives from the State; more than half of what it spends itself is wages. It invested about a fifth of what it planned, serviced its rescue-era bank debt almost exactly on schedule, and closed with €54 379 035source · Município de Évora of total debt — legal, with room to spare, for a municipality that spent the middle of the last decade far above the legal ceiling. The strain shows somewhere else entirely: in the unpaid supplier invoices and the 137source · Município de Évora-day payment queue.

The budget is a forecast of hopes; the execution rate is the fact. The rate has fallen from 96source · Município de Évora% to 61.44source · Município de Évora% in four years, and the mechanism is visible in the record: money from outside — recovery-plan works, the hospital protocol — is budgeted before anyone else has committed it, and then does not arrive. So the size of the 2026 budget, €110 840 577, larger again, predicts very little by itself; the first number worth checking in the 2026 accounts is the execution rate, not the total (inference).

Two debts, moving in opposite directions. The bank layer falls on schedule — the regulator's index runs 242.6source · calculated% to 105.5source · calculated% across eleven years, a genuinely disciplined decade. The supplier layer is doing the opposite: 70.20% growth in the ordinary supplier line in one year, a payment queue of 137source · Município de Évora days, arrears of €4 976 172source · Município de Évora for the second year running. Read together, part of the room to keep amortising the past is being taken from the patience of present suppliers — the composition of the debt is worsening even while its total falls (inference).

Investment is the shock absorber. Wages executed at 96.55%, loan repayments at 93.64%, investment at 21.13%. The first two are contractual; when revenue disappoints, the investment line is where the disappointment lands (inference). Meanwhile the investment that carries Évora's name is mostly being made by hands other than the Câmara's: the recovery plan attributes €167 372 756 to the place, and the municipality itself received €1 087 287 of co-financed capital in the year. The town hall is, for now, closer to a spectator than a builder of the investment named after its city (inference).

The unsigned year is the governance fact to keep. The 2024 accounts were rejected 2source · Marques, Cruz & Associados to 5source · Marques, Cruz & Associados and exist without external certification. The clean 2025 opinion restores the external witness going forward; it cannot restore it backward, and every multi-year table inherits that asterisk on its 2024 column.

• The 2026 execution rate, when the accounts appear around spring 2027 — does the falling series break?
• Whether the "Évora 2027" money budgeted for 2026 — €3 984 060 — actually lands, after 2025's zero.
• The supplier line and the payment queue: the first sign of genuine easing would be those two turning before anything else does.
• DGAL's next file: the 2024 index stands at 105.5source · calculated%, and every year of the series stands above the revenue average — the index falling through that line would be the true end of the rescue era (inference).

Sources

• Prestação de Contas 2025 and Certificação Legal das Contas 2025, Câmara Municipal de Évora — the accounts and the auditor's opinion.
• Grandes Opções do Plano e Orçamento 2026, Câmara Municipal de Évora — the budget in force.
• Evolução do endividamento total por município, DGAL, eleven annual files, accounts years 2014–2024 — the regulator's independent debt series. The pre-2014 files use a different legal debt concept.
• Anuário Financeiro dos Municípios Portugueses 2024 — conclusions presentation only, hosted by OCC; an academic source, labelled as such wherever it appears. The full study is not openly published.