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Serra de Carnaxide Begins to Fill with Homes
15 October 2018
A project that has been paralysed for over a decade is now moving ahead, while others are in the pipeline. In Oeiras, the SL Benfica sports city is also beginning to take off.
People who drive by the Amadora-Sintra Hospital on the IC19 may nor be aware that a kind of small city shaped like a half-moon is growing on the hills above Carnaxide. The SkyCity project will offer 365 homes between houses and apartments, and its developers are aiming at attracting the Portuguese middle class. While it is perhaps the largest, it is not the only investment being undertaken on the mountain that is shared by the municipalities of Oeiras and Amadora. It is one of the rare areas on the outskirts of Lisbon that has yet to be taken over by new construction. In the coming years, however, its landscape will change, a lot.
The SkyCity project was first discussed more than 15 years ago when the Amadora city council reserved an area for the project in its Detail Plan for the Serra de Carnaxide, approved in 1996. The project never took off though due to a lack of funds and the land remained empty until its recent acquisition by the real estate group JPS. “We are not going to do what had been planned before: the architecture has changed, energy issues have changed, times have changed,” says João Sousa, the company’s CEO. The company has pursued a strategy of investing in projects were approved, but that then fell by the wayside during the crisis, thereby avoiding the need to go through the municipal licensing process, which can take years.
“We have to offer housing to people who actually live in Portugal,” the executive explained. “In recent times, real estate development has been focused on urban rehabilitation, but it’s a bad situation for the Portuguese if they are limited to that, considering current market prices.”
With 90% of its homes already sold, SkyCity is looking to give “high-quality, new homes to people who aren’t able to keep up with the prices in the city centres,” says João Sousa. JPS had been selling four-bedroom houses, that were still on paper, for €300,000, but online sites already have them listed for 400 to 450,000 euros. The development will eventually house a population of about 1,500 residents. “There will be some commerce, aimed at supporting the local community,” says the entrepreneur, who argues that there is a need for more new construction outside urban centres to “offer affordable quality housing.”
JPS is investing in another development in the area of Carnaxide, though not in the mountains. The new venture is called Dream Living, a closed condominium of 90 homes that is part of a larger, 800-home development around the Mama Lighthouse, in the municipality of Oeiras. After years of paralysis, construction is now moving ahead, worrying neighbours in the area who fear an exponential increase in car traffic and difficulties in parking.
While JPS is building SkyCity on the northern slope of the Carnaxide mountain range, and, practically next to it, the infrastructure for an even bigger project is under construction, the Oeiras city council guarantees that “there is no approved project” for the southern side, though several have been publicly announced and even approved by the local authority. This was the case with Villa Cavallia, a large development that would have included a hotel, flats, commerce, a nursing home, clinic and an equestrian centre. In 2014, the council, then led by Paulo Vistas, approved the project, but construction never started.
“The municipality has been acquiring land in that area since 1987, and is now the largest owner,” an official source at the Oeiras council told Público, contrary to what Vistas had said four years ago, when he stated that the municipality did not have enough money to buy or expropriate all existing private lots in the mountains.
SL Benfica’s sporting city under licensing
A year ago, a little more than a week after the local elections, SL Benfica’s president Luís Filipe Vieira and the then mayor of Oeiras, Paulo Vistas, met along the Serra de Carnaxide to announce a ten-hectare project, the Sports Modality City, which was to be built and operated by the Luz club. From that point on, nothing much else happened.
Queried by Público, the municipality, now led by Isaltino Morais, insisted that “there are projects currently approved for the Serra da Carnaxide,” while an official source at the club noted that the two parties had met a few months ago “to go over the current state of the project and to reaffirm our interest in its implementation.” The same source added that “the Oeiras council must undertake some prior procedural work on the area before the land is ready for the project. That work is underway.”
According to the pre-project, presented in September 2017, the land will give rise to a martial arts and gymnasium pavilion, a rugby field with a running track, a massage centre, an indoor running track, swimming pool, a sports hall, a soccer field, restaurant, meeting centre, clinic gymnasium and a parking silo that will fit 540 cars.
The idea of SL Benfica doing a project in that vein in Oeiras has existed for almost ten years, and they even signed an agreement in 2009. After re-election a year ago, the mayor said he saw “no impediment” to its advance.
Original Story: Público – João Pedro Pincha
Translation: Richard Turner