Ericeira's water cut off without warning, one of 14 unplanned cuts in two weeks
Ericeira's historic centre lost its water on Monday afternoon with no warning at all, and it stayed off long after the water company says it came back.
SMAS de Mafra, the municipal water and sanitation service, lists the cut on its website under "Não programadas", unplanned interruptions: "the entire town (historic centre of the village)" on 28 September, from 15:45 to 17:30. Nobody was told in advance. And the end time does not match what residents saw. In the homes in Ericeira that feed our outage log, the water went at 16:43, and more than two hours after SMAS's own recorded end it still had not properly come back: at 19:31 a kitchen tap in the historic centre gave only a thin, sputtering trickle, as the video above shows, and the log still had the water off at 19:39. The log counts over three hours without water, and still counting at the time of writing.
It was not the only unplanned cut in the area that day. That morning, the water went off on Avenida Colinas do Atlântico, covering Casal Carido and Alto Ribeira d'Ilhas, from 9:30 to 11:30. A third unplanned interruption hit Póvoa da Galega in the early afternoon.
The full list on the SMAS website shows how often this happens. Between 14 and 28 September, SMAS recorded 14 unplanned water interruptions across the municipality of Mafra, in places including Sobreiro, Casa Nova, Outeirinho, Pinhal dos Frades, Romeirão, Gorcinhos, Monte Godel, São Julião, Alqueidão, Casais de São Lourenço and Fonte Boa da Brincosa. That is roughly one a day. Over the same two weeks, SMAS carried out just three planned interruptions, announced in advance: in Fonte Boa dos Nabos on 16 September, Casal Mourão on 17 September and a few streets of Ericeira on 22 September. Unplanned cuts outnumbered planned ones by almost five to one. Charneca lost its water three times in eight days, on 17, 21 and 24 September, with Rua Poço do Vicente on the list every time.
Unplanned means breakdowns: burst pipes and failures that nobody saw coming, or that nobody fixed before they failed. A network that breaks this often, and in the same streets again and again, points to ageing infrastructure rather than bad luck. The list gives the area and the times, but no cause. For a café, a guesthouse or a family with small children, losing water without notice, for longer than officially recorded, is not a minor detail.
It adds to a familiar story for Ericeira residents. The town's power outages were declared fixed in July and have carried on since. We now log water cuts alongside power cuts on the Ericeira outages page, so there is a public record of how often basic services fail here.
Both planned and unplanned interruptions are listed on the SMAS de Mafra website. If your water goes off, report it to SMAS de Mafra so it is on record, and note when it actually comes back: as Monday showed, the official times do not always tell the whole story.