The "Event to Commemorate the 25th Anniversary of the Albufeira Convention" will take place this morning in Aranjuez, in the Madrid region, and will be attended by the Environment Ministers of Portugal, Maria da Graça Carvalho, and Spain, Teresa Ribera, and will include a series of lectures on water and rivers shared by the two countries.

Maria da Graça Carvalho said on 6 August that Spain will pay Portugal two million euros per year for water abstraction from the Alqueva, an amount that should be included in an agreement to be signed today between the two countries.

The meeting between the two ministers in Aranjuez - which was preceded by a technical meeting on Thursday between teams from both countries - should also serve to finalise the agreement that will allow the advance of the capture of water from the Guadiana River in the Pomarão area, in the municipality of Mértola, in the district of Beja, to supply the Algarve, which affects international waters.

The Portuguese minister also said, on 6 August, that the agreement to be signed with Spain will also involve issues related to the Tagus River.

According to Maria da Graça Carvalho, Portugal requested a guarantee of the Tagus' ecological flows, so that they are not only monthly or weekly, but also daily, so that there is “a more uniform distribution throughout the days so that it is not all on one day of the week and then there is no flow”.

When asked by journalists at the time whether Portugal had made concessions in order to reach a bilateral consensus, Maria Graça Carvalho responded that it was not necessary to give in on anything and that the negotiation went “very well”, stressing that Spain was interested “in resolving the problems”. The following day, on August 7, the president of the Alqueva company, José Pedro Salema, considered that the payment that Spain will start making for water collected from this reservoir, in Alentejo, ends with a “very great injustice” because “there are beneficiaries 100 meters from each other and some pay and others do not”.

The president of the Alqueva Development and Infrastructure Company (EDIA) explained that the beneficiaries on the Portuguese side pay for the water they collect from the Alqueva dam, unlike farmers with collections on the Spanish side, who do not have any charge.

As for the two million euros to be paid annually by Spain, José Pedro Salema stressed that the amount was determined through the direct application of the Alqueva Multipurpose Project (EFMA) tariff and that “Spanish collections will pay the same as Portuguese collections”.

The Spanish Government, in response to questions from the Lusa news agency, always referred to statements by the Director General of Water, Dolores Pascual, to Radio Huelva, on August 8.

According to Dolores Pascual, who never confirmed the figures put forward by the Portuguese minister, the new agreement between the two countries "should regulate both the volumes [of water] withdrawn and possible payments (…) that Spanish farmers must make to the Portuguese authorities”.

Dolores Pascual added that within the scope of the Albufeira Convention, Portugal and Spain will also regulate the flow of the Guadiana "in the final stretch" of the river, that is, near the mouth, in the Huelva area.

"Once the necessary flows for the river are guaranteed, we can talk about other possible uses on both sides of the border. The [Spanish] ministry's priority is fundamentally to provide greater guarantees for the uses that currently exist in the province of Huelva. In a drought situation, such as the one we are experiencing, they should have greater guarantees", she added.

Regarding the Tagus, 37 associations and civic movements have in recent weeks called for the prior disclosure of the agreement being negotiated between Portugal and Spain, with the warning that the Tagus “urgently needs a true regime of ecological flows determined by scientific methods, which contributes to the good ecological state of the water bodies and to the conservation of riverside ecosystems”.