"This is indeed a Government operating at high speed"

This Thursday, the concession for the rail track between Porto (Campanhã) and Oiã, the first in the first stage of the High-Speed Rail project. The project represents a structural milestone in the territory as rail transportation is central in the Portuguese mobility policy and detrimental to meeting the decarbonisation targets for transportation for 2030, in line with the EU Green Deal and the Paris Agreement.

"The event we are celebrating today is two months early" stated the Minister of Infrastructure and Housing Miguel Pinto Luz at the ceremony to award the High-Speed rail concession (Porto-Oiã).

On the day when the draft State Budget for 2025 is delivered, the Prime Minister stresses that "there is life beyond the Budget", referring to the "transversal governance context that wishes to encompass all areas where political power, and particularly the Government power must be exercised daily".

This award is another step in developing the Porto/Lisbon High-Speed Rail and is the outcome of a tender launched by Infraestruturas de Portugal in January of this year. The concession was awarded to the LusoLav Consortium, made up of the companies: Mota-Engil, Engenharia e Construção, S.A. Teixeira Duarte – Engenharia e Construções, S.A., Casais – Engenharia e Construção, S.A., Alves Ribeiro, S.A., Conduril – Engenharia, S.A., and Construções Gabriel A.S. Couto, S.A. . The Minister of Infrastructure and Housing highlighted "taking on the risk shared with the Portuguese State", as this is a fully national consortium. "The Portuguese companies are aligned with the country’s strategic goals", he stressed.

With this, Portugal meets the commitments undertaken in the 2030 National Investment Plan (PNI 2030) and the European Commission targets to double rail passenger traffic in a multimodal and sustainable logic. In fact, "investing in rail services is investing in the environment, the planet, the future. (…) Infrastructure is the vascular network in our economy, Miguel Pinto Luz said. 

The national rail network’s maturity and competitiveness are slightly below the EU average (16th place). As such, it is essential to restructure the north-south axis in the national rail network to improve rail access to the international corridors and the future Lisbon airport. 

Miguel Pinto Luz claimed that "in infrastructure we do not take any decisions that won’t last for generations". According to the Minister, these decisions imply consensus and predictability, and these are attributes present in the High-Speed rail matter in Portugal. 

It was following this logic of thinking about the common good and te country’s future that the Government decided the new Lisbon airport’s site, the Lisbon-Madrid high-speed connection, instructing Infraestruturas de Portugal to continue with all the necessary studies to launch the third Tagus crossing and implementing the High-Speed track linking Lisbon and Porto to Vigo. "This is indeed a Government that is operating at high speed", the Prime Minister said. This is a Government "that wants to be quick, fulfils that swiftness, but is not rash".