Although living in a country renowned for its mild climate, hundreds of thousands of Portuguese suffer every winter from the cold in their own homes, which they find even more difficult to heat in the midst of galloping inflation.
In her small terraced house in the southern suburbs of Lisbon, whose walls are yellowed by humidity, Maria de Jesus Alves Costa had to unplug her space heaters.
“I can’t afford to heat anymore (…). The last bill was almost 95 euros”, she sighs, wrapped in a faux fur cape reaching her waist while standing in front of the open door which overlooks a small inner courtyard, to enjoy the last rays of sunshine of the day.
“I go to bed earlier, so as not to be cold”, confides to AFP this 68-year-old retiree, who lives with her husband in this district of the town of Costa da Caparica, whose beaches fill with people in summer. .
Lack of thermal comfort is common in Portugal, where 16% of the approximately 10 million inhabitants believe that they are unable to heat their homes properly.
With an average in the European Union of 6.9%, this indicator places this Iberian country in 5th place behind Bulgaria, Lithuania, Cyprus and Greece, according to the most recent data from Eurostat.
“The problem of low family incomes (…), combined with the poor state of housing, means that, despite Portugal’s significant sunshine and its mild winters, people are really cold in their homes”, explains Joao Pedro Gouveia, researcher at the Environment and Sustainability Research Center (CENSE) of the Nova University of Lisbon.
After the Carnation Revolution of 1974, “we built quickly and of poor quality” to house those who arrived from the former Portuguese colonies in Africa but also to cope with a major rural exodus, specifies this specialist.
In a social housing district in the northeast of Lisbon, block 70, which has not been maintained since its construction fifty years ago, bears witness to the extremely precarious conditions in which some Portuguese people live.
One of its inhabitants, Francisca Chagas, occupies an apartment on the 6th and last floor, whose walls and ceiling are blackened by infiltrations. When it rains, the water even falls into the plastic basins she has placed in her kitchen.
“I never had the heating at home,” says this 75-year-old retiree, who resists the cold by wrapping herself in a blanket on the sofa.
“There are families with sick people who need medicine but they have to choose: either they buy the medicine or they pay for the electricity,” adds her neighbor, Teresa Pina, amid record price increases in Portugal, up to 10% in October.
According to data from the population census carried out in 2021, 30% of Portuguese homes are not equipped with any heating system. Nearly 22% of homes only have a fireplace and only 14% have central heating.
With their single-glazed wooden windows, the vast majority of buildings suffer from insulation problems, while the average winter temperature barely drops below 10°C.
To remedy this, the socialist government of Antonio Costa has taken several measures to help renovate millions of poorly insulated homes, including a grant of 1,300 euros for energy upgrades.
The executive also unveiled a “long-term national energy poverty strategy” in January, which aims to reduce the number of people affected from the current 19% to 1% by 2050.
The government thus plans to draw on the envelope of 16 billion euros of European funds from the post-Covid recovery plan to finance part of this program.
Of the approximately three billion euros allocated to the “climate transition”, the government has provided a budget of 300 million euros to improve the energy efficiency of residential buildings.
But the government’s goal “does not seem realistic” and the funding is “manifestly insufficient”, worries Manuela Almeida, professor of civil engineering at the University of Minho (north).
03/03/2023 23:50:41 – Lisbon (AFP) – © 2023 AFP