A cheque arrives, but the phones don't ring
Six months after storms Kristin, Leonardo and Marta tore through central Portugal, Brussels has finally sent money — and hundreds of homes, many of them owned by foreign residents around Leiria, are still waiting for a working landline.
The European Commission last week approved a €65.37 million advance from the EU Solidarity Fund after concluding that Portugal met the conditions for assistance, though the payment is only an initial contribution. Any further allocation must still be approved by the European Parliament and the Council of the EU, subject to available funding. For homeowners who spent the spring chasing insurers, contractors and telecoms call centres, the approval is welcome but a long way from closure.
Why this matters for foreigners in Portugal
Leiria and its coastal municipalities — Marinha Grande, Pombal, the villages around the pine forest — have become a magnet for British, Dutch, German and North American buyers over the past decade, drawn by lower prices than the Algarve or Lisbon coast and easy access to Óbidos, Nazaré and the Silver Coast. Many of these owners split their time between Portugal and a home country, relying on a fixed line for security systems, medical alert devices, or simply because their property was built before fibre reached the village. When that line goes dead for months, it isn't a minor inconvenience — it can mean no working alarm, no way to verify a property is safe from a distance, and no easy channel for elderly residents to reach emergency services.
What actually happened
Brussels described the storms as an "exceptionally severe" sequence between January 22 and February 15, bringing destructive winds, torrential rain, flooding, landslides and widespread disruption to electricity, water and communications, with Kristin followed by Leonardo and Marta. Together the storms killed at least 19 people between late January and early March and left hundreds injured, displaced or temporarily homeless, with more than half the deaths reportedly occurring during clean-up and recovery work. Leiria bore the brunt: Wikipedia's record of the event notes wind gusts topping 200 km/h and describes Leiria district as the area most devastated by Kristin, with nearly all homes in Pombal suffering damage.
Electricity came back relatively quickly compared with telecoms. At the height of the crisis around one million customers lost electricity, with about 855,000 still without power an hour later, particularly in Guarda, Coimbra, Castelo Branco, Portalegre, Leiria, Santarém and Setúbal — though all supplies were restored by the end of February, physical repairs continue across some 6,000 kilometres of the network. Network operator E-Redes estimates that repairing the infrastructure and making it more resilient to future extreme weather will cost about €110 million, of which some €65 million of work has been completed. The company has identified 5,300 poles and supports still requiring attention, out of forty-seven damaged substations.
Fixed-line telecoms lagged even further behind power. Coverage from March described the fixed network as the real sticking point, hampered by continuing power problems and the physical rebuilding of cable infrastructure in rural, flood-hit areas, with Leiria and Pombal singled out for persistent outages. Six months on, the picture has improved but not resolved: Portugal has received the €65.37 million advance from the EU Solidarity Fund, yet around 1,600 customers — mainly in the Leiria region — still lack restored landlines.
The gap between the headline figure and the reality on the ground
The €65.37 million is an advance against a much larger claim. Total damage from the storms was cited in Portugal's request to the EU at more than €5.3 billion — a figure that dwarfs the initial EU payment and underlines why reconstruction is being phased over months, not weeks. Separately, the government announced the PTRR programme — Portugal Transformation, Recovery and Resilience — at the end of April, with a total budget of €22.6 billion to implement 96 measures by 2035 aimed at broader economic recovery, alongside a €1 billion lending package from Banco Português de Fomento announced in early June, with €500 million earmarked for small and medium-sized enterprises.
None of that money is earmarked line-by-line for the last mile of copper cable running to a farmhouse outside Pombal. Telecoms repair sits with private operators — NOS, Vodafone, MEO — working alongside E-Redes on shared poles and ducts, and progress depends on where a property sits on the priority list for physical rebuild work rather than on EU disbursement timetables.
What foreign homeowners should do
If your landline is still down, keep a written record of every fault report and reference number — insurers and, where relevant, municipal compensation schemes will ask for it. Confirm with your operator whether your line is scheduled for repair or awaiting a rebuilt pole or substation; ask specifically whether the delay is electrical or purely telecoms-side. If you rely on a landline for a medical alert system or alarm monitoring, ask your provider about temporary mobile or satellite workarounds rather than waiting for full restoration. And if the property is a second home you don't visit often, arrange for a neighbour or local property manager to check it periodically — several owners in the region only discovered damage or ongoing outages weeks after the fact.
For anyone weighing a purchase in the affected districts, this episode is a useful reminder to ask about infrastructure resilience alongside the usual checks on IMT, deed costs and NIF requirements covered in our property guide.
What to watch next
The European Parliament and Council still need to sign off on any funding beyond the initial advance, and Portugal's own damage estimate — running into the billions — means this file will stay open well into 2027. Whether the remaining 1,600 Leiria households get reconnected before winter arrives again will be the real test of whether the aid announced in Brussels translates into cable in the ground.