Environmentalists call for monitoring of rivers in the Douro basin used by bathers

Environmental groups are warning this Saturday of the urgent need to monitor the water quality of rivers in the Douro basin, which have large numbers of swimmers but are currently not considered suitable for bathing.

According to environmentalists from #MovRioDouro, ANP/WWF and Zero, in the Portuguese part of the Douro River basin there are 23 places designated by the Portuguese Environmental Protection Agency (APA) as bathing areas, and in the Porto metropolitan area, only the Playa da Lomba, in Gondomar, is considered suitable for swimming.

“On the one hand, we are very happy to see that this year the rivers of the Douro basin have been able to collect more than two dozen bathing waters. On the other hand, we remain concerned about the state of degradation of the Douro waters. The river, located near the mouth, given that only Lomba beach can be classified,” says Gustavo Briz of #MovRioDouro, a citizen movement defending the rivers of the Douro hydrographic basin, quoted in the statement.

In a joint statement with Zero and ANP/WWF (representing the international World Wide Fund for Nature in Portugal), it is stressed that with the arrival of summer and the opening of the swimming season, many people are eager to cool off in the rivers, but, as we warn you, not all waters are suitable for swimming.

For this reason, organizations are calling for urgent monitoring of inland water quality.

“If the waters visited by thousands of bathers were monitored, we would certainly have clearer information and red flags in most of these places, which would serve as a warning to bathers. Now this does not happen, on the contrary. A small warning from the APA, which does not recommend bathing, municipalities often create conditions for visiting baths, for example, installing bars, toilets [casa de banho] or buoys and signs that confuse visitors and attract them to swim,” says Gustavo Briz.

The organizations question APA’s criteria for qualifying river water beaches as bathing beaches and call for greater transparency by requiring disclosure of the full list of beaches evaluated, including the reasons for their classification as bathing waters.

Environmentalists also suggest that this information should also be submitted to the public consultation process, rather than just for the final proposal for the bathing water list, as is currently the case.

For this movement, “the current lack of monitoring and dissemination of microbiological testing results for unclassified waters puts thousands of bathers at risk.”

This is because, he points out, many places, such as Zebreiros in Gondomar and Areinho de Oliveira do Douro in Vila Nova de Gaia, “have bathing infrastructure such as bars and toilets, which encourages bathers to frequent these waters without adequate information assessing their quality.”

The organizations believe that APA should provide information during the swimming season about the microbiological quality of water in high-demand areas, especially those where the water obviously does not have the minimum required quality.

On the other hand, they argue that “municipalities should not provide bathing infrastructure without confirming the quality of the water for this purpose, as this could lead to the population taking an unknown risk, and the APA itself should provide clear instructions to municipalities in this regard.”

This bathing season, the Portuguese part of the Douro River basin has six inland bathing areas in Sabugal, four in Mirandela, three in Macedo de Cavaleiros and Vinhais, two in Moimenta da Beira and one in Castro Daire, Freixo de Espada à Cinta, Gondomar, Sernancelha and Valpazos.