The Mafra City Council has made the decision to hold a competition for the construction of a facility that will house the National Sound Archive. The project, funded by the Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP) is expected to be completed in a year.

The plan by Ateliê Carvalho Araújo Arquitetos calls for the construction of a structure from scratch that is framed by the surrounding area and makes use of the land's slope. The five-floor building, which is expected to cost 4.5 million euros, will include service areas, technical infrastructures, an administrative office floor and a storage floor.

The Municipality of Mafra and the General Directorate of Books, Archives, and Libraries partnered to create the project, which was then developed under a mission structure overseen by the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Higher Education.

The motivation for setting up the archive in Mafra stems from the finding of half a million records belonging to different entities, 90% of which are found in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. The National Sound Archive's establishment had been delayed since 2006, but it was brought up once more in January 2016.

Moreover, the National Sound Archive's technical dossier, which was submitted by the mission structure in 2022, stated that "more than 500 thousand sound supports are identified, of which 170 thousand require urgent intervention".