Almada - Portugal

Almada

Country: Portugal

Population: 177238

Elevation: 33

Area: 70.01 square kilometre

Web: https://www.cm-almada.pt/

Area code: 21

Overall score

Total

A+

Amenities

Childcare & Education

A+

Commute

A+

Culture & Entertainment

B+

Health

A+

NIMBY

D-

Noise

D+

The daily-life lens: what the internal scores suggest

Almada sits on the south bank of the Tagus, directly opposite central Lisbon, and functions less like a distant “commuter suburb” than a close-in city with its own centres, campuses, civic facilities and coastal districts. The municipality counted about 177,238 residents in 2021, and the age structure is notably mature: the municipal census-based profile indicates roughly 42,185 people aged 65+ (about 24%) alongside around 24,219 aged 0–14.

The internal grades provided here are accessibility/coverage indicators—they signal how many relevant services and facilities are likely to be reachable within walking distance, not whether those services are “good” or “bad.” A high Health grade, for example, does not rate clinical quality; it suggests that more healthcare-related facilities (pharmacies, clinics, gyms, etc.) are likely nearby. Likewise, the Noise and NIMBY grades are negative (penalty) signals: a weaker grade means a higher probability of being close to noise sources or undesirable land uses, not that the entire city is noisy or unpleasant.

Amenities: A — daily errands are likely to be workable on foot (groceries, cafés, basic services).
Commute: A+ — strong walking-distance access to transit options; this aligns with Almada’s role as a cross-river connector to Lisbon.
Health (accessibility): A+ — dense local coverage of pharmacies/clinics/fitness-type facilities is likely near the profiled location.
Culture & Entertainment: B+ — culture is present but tends to cluster in a few hubs rather than being evenly distributed street-by-street.
Childcare & Education: A+ — strong proximity-based access to schools/childcare (coverage), and Almada also hosts a major university campus.
NIMBY: D- (negative) and Noise: D+ (negative) — convenience comes with a higher likelihood of nearby friction: traffic corridors, active/legacy industrial riverfront land, or other infrastructure that can generate noise, heavy vehicle movement, or construction phases.
Total: A+ — overall, the profile reads as “high convenience, high connectivity,” with specific, localised downsides that can materially affect daily comfort.

Why Almada feels the way it does

Almada’s urban form is a product of three forces: (1) proximity to Lisbon and the river crossing logic, (2) a strong mid-to-late 20th-century growth phase that produced large residential districts and transport corridors, and (3) a coastline that pulls leisure, seasonal demand and second-home dynamics toward Caparica. The result is a municipality with multiple “daily-life centres” rather than one continuous historic core: older hilltop and riverside areas oriented to the Tagus; inland residential districts shaped by post-war expansion; and the coastal strip shaped by beach access and weekend rhythms.

The demographic profile from the municipal census-based indicators—high absolute numbers of seniors alongside substantial child cohorts—typically translates into a city that must balance school logistics, healthcare access, and day-to-day mobility for people who do not drive.

Housing and neighbourhood patterns: what the numbers imply in real life

Prices and rents (using official/statistical proxies)

Almada’s housing costs have been rising in line with broader Lisbon-metro pressures, but the most useful “ground truth” for comparisons is often not listing prices—it is official statistical proxies. The municipal indicator report (drawing on official statistics) shows the median rent per m² for new rental contracts rising from about €8.20/m² (Q1 2020) to about €10.67/m² (Q4 2023). Over the same period, a median “value per m²” proxy for housing transactions rose from roughly €1,584/m² to €2,374/m².

Translated into household arithmetic, €10.67/m² implies that a 60 m² apartment in the median new-contract range lands around €640/month before utilities, while 90 m² lands around €960/month. The €2,374/m² transaction proxy implies that an 80 m² home at that median is around €190k. These are medians—Almada’s variation is wide, and proximity to fast cross-river links, the riverfront, or the coastal axis can push figures materially above municipal medians.

Building stock, comfort, and the “quiet” question

Almada’s residential reality is mixed: newer buildings and rehabilitated areas can be comfortable and energy-efficient, while older blocks can be drafty and acoustically porous—especially where construction dates back to mid-century or where there are legacies of informal growth. The municipal diagnostic material explicitly notes that some older/informal neighbourhood fabrics include buildings from mid-20th-century decades and can show deficient construction quality, including poor energy and acoustic performance.

In practical terms, this matters because the internal profile shows a Noise penalty (D+). Even with solid transit and amenities on the doorstep, daily comfort can be shaped by whether the building envelope dampens traffic and night-time activity, and whether bedrooms face away from busy corridors. In Almada, that trade-off is often stark: a “high convenience” location can also be near a main road approach, a busier commercial strip, or a redevelopment area.

Transport and commuting: structure, time, and friction

Almada’s commuting advantage is structural: it is one of the closest dense municipalities to central Lisbon, and daily life is organised around a set of cross-river and cross-bridge connections. The internal Commute A+ grade signals that the profiled location likely sits within easy walking reach of more than one transport option (not necessarily that service is perfect—coverage is the signal).

What the census commuting metric shows

On average, residents who commute using individual transport (i.e., private modes) recorded a mean commuting duration of about 22.83 minutes in the 2021 census indicator. That is slightly above the City of Lisbon’s equivalent (about 19.64 minutes) and broadly in line with the wider “Grande Lisboa / Península de Setúbal” commuting geography.

This number is best read as a baseline for “normal” daily movement rather than a promise: it averages short local trips with longer cross-metro commutes. The lived experience depends heavily on which corridor a household relies on (river crossings, bridge approaches, or inland routes) and on schedule discipline—how long the walk to the stop is, whether transfers are needed, and how peak-hour queues behave.

How commute options typically distribute across the city

Cross-river logic tends to dominate for Lisbon-oriented work: proximity to the riverfront and major interchanges reduces daily friction.
Bus-based coverage matters for “first/last mile” and for connecting inland districts to rail/river nodes.
Car convenience can be real for off-peak or non-Lisbon destinations, but the internal Noise and NIMBY penalties are consistent with the reality that major corridors and infrastructure create localised stress in exchange for speed.

Ticketing is generally organised at the metropolitan scale in the Lisbon region, and households commonly rely on integrated monthly passes rather than per-trip pricing for daily commuting.

Amenities and errands logistics: what “A” coverage looks like

An Amenities A grade usually corresponds to a “compact errands map”: groceries, cafés, pharmacies, and basic services are likely within walking distance, allowing daily tasks to be done without planning around a car. Because no granular POI list or counts were provided, micro-claims (e.g., “three supermarkets within 10 minutes”) would be speculative and are avoided here.

In Almada, the most reliable pattern is that amenities are dense in older and centralised fabrics and more car-oriented in newer, lower-density pockets. The practical trade-off is that high convenience tends to overlap with busier streets, more traffic, and occasionally late-night activity—consistent with the internal Noise D+ penalty.

What typically feels abundant in high-coverage parts of Almada:

Everyday retail and cafés anchored by local high streets and transport nodes.
Basic personal services (barbers, small repairs, banking/ATMs) clustered in walkable strips.
Sports/fitness infrastructure in the form of gyms, courts, and municipal facilities—often a major contributor to a high Health accessibility grade.

What more often concentrates in a few hubs (even in a well-covered location): larger-format retail, specialised medical consultations, and some administrative services that may require a short transit trip rather than a short walk.

Healthcare access: separating neighbourhood coverage from system realities

The internal Health (accessibility) A+ grade suggests strong walking-distance coverage of health-adjacent facilities—pharmacies, clinics, dentists, and fitness infrastructure—near the profiled location. This is a meaningful daily-life advantage: it reduces the “small frictions” of prescriptions, minor consultations, and routine needs.

However, Portugal’s health system reality also matters: primary care access can be constrained by family-doctor availability, and specialist waiting times are often driven by regional capacity rather than neighbourhood proximity. Neighbourhood-level coverage can make it easier to reach care, but it does not remove system-wide queues.

One useful practical lens in Almada is to distinguish between:

Fast-access needs (pharmacy, simple diagnostics, routine dentistry), where high local coverage genuinely reduces friction.
Capacity-constrained needs (specialists, elective procedures), where the determining variable is often appointment availability rather than distance.

Childcare and education: coverage, demand pressure, and logistics

The internal Childcare & Education A+ grade indicates strong proximity-based coverage of education facilities (coverage, not quality). This aligns with Almada’s role as an education node inside the Lisbon metro: NOVA School of Science and Technology (FCT NOVA), located in Monte de Caparica, reports on the order of 8,500 students, which materially affects daily rhythms—term-time transit loads, student housing demand, and weekday footfall in surrounding areas.

Demand pressure is also legible in demographics: the municipal indicator profile’s child cohort (0–14) is large enough to make school logistics a consistent topic in many neighbourhoods—drop-off peaks, after-school activity scheduling, and competition for childcare slots.

In practice, “education convenience” in Almada tends to depend on two things:

Catchment and placement (where public school assignment applies), which can turn “nearby school” into “nearby school but not the assigned one.”
Transfer complexity for households combining childcare, school, and Lisbon-bound commuting—where the internal Commute A+ grade is especially valuable because it implies multiple nearby fallback routes.

Culture and leisure: real institutions, uneven distribution

The internal Culture & Entertainment B+ grade is consistent with a city where culture exists and is visible, but tends to be spatially clustered—stronger around specific venues and programming hubs than evenly spread across all residential streets.

A clear anchor is the Teatro Municipal Joaquim Benite, inaugurated in 2005 and designed specifically to house the Companhia de Teatro de Almada, active in the city since 1978.

That venue is also closely tied to the Festival de Almada, which is programmed as a high-intensity period of theatre/dance sessions plus outdoor concerts and associated cultural activity (as described by Portugal’s Directorate-General for the Arts in its coverage of the festival edition).

Daily-life implication: outside major programme peaks, culture in Almada often feels “punctuated” rather than constant—strong nights and weekends around key venues, quieter stretches elsewhere. This spatial concentration is part of why a B+ can coexist with an overall A+ total: culture is present, but not necessarily at the same walking-distance density as errands and commuting infrastructure.

Urban planning, land use, and development: why NIMBY can be high even in a great location

The internal NIMBY D- penalty is a strong hint that the profiled location may be near land uses that generate heavy traffic, visual/industrial externalities, or long construction cycles. Almada’s current planning framework makes that plausible in several corridors, particularly the riverfront and redevelopment zones.

A key named project is the Plano de Urbanização Almada Nascente – Cidade da Água, which sits alongside other active urban plans listed by the municipality (including plans focused on Cacilhas rehabilitation and coastal “Polis” beach-area plans).

Even when redevelopment is ultimately positive—bringing new housing, public space, and economic activity—its “middle years” are classic NIMBY territory: lorry movements, dust/noise, temporary road changes, and uncertainty about final land-use mixes. In daily terms, this can show up as:

Unpredictable noise patterns (weekday construction vs. evening street activity).
Occasional congestion spikes where works interact with already-busy corridors.
A higher premium on choosing a building orientation (rear-facing bedrooms, better glazing) rather than judging only the neighbourhood name.

Safety and environment: avoiding exaggeration, using measurable indicators

Police-recorded crime: what can be said with data

Municipal-level, police-recorded totals are available via PORDATA’s compiled dataset. For Almada, total crimes recorded by police rose from 6,828 (2022) to 7,789 (2023). Selected categories in the same dataset show, for 2023, 171 residential thefts, 576 thefts from motor vehicles, and 512 records of domestic violence against spouse/analogous partner.

Interpreting these figures requires caution: recorded crime depends on reporting behaviour and enforcement practices. As an approximate “scale” indicator only, using the 2021 resident population (about 177k), 7,789 recorded crimes equates to roughly 44 recorded crimes per 1,000 residents. This is not a victimisation rate; it is a reporting-based administrative measure.

For a complementary, non-police lens, APAV’s local statistics for Almada (victim support cases) note a strong concentration in “crimes against people” among the cases recorded in its Almada victim support office dataset, which can help contextualise demand for support services even when police categories and victim-service categories do not align one-to-one.

Air quality and noise: regional monitoring, localised exposure

Air quality in the Lisbon region is monitored systematically, and the regional air-quality assessment for 2024 highlights that the persistent legal non-compliance issue is annual mean NO₂ at a high-traffic central Lisbon station (Avenida da Liberdade), while the same report notes no non-compliance for PM₁₀ limit values and no ozone target exceedances in the regional network (with ozone remaining episode-driven rather than chronic in recent years).

For Almada, the daily-life implication is less about “city-wide air quality” and more about street-level exposure: households close to heavy-traffic corridors tend to experience higher NO₂ and noise, while households buffered by distance, elevation, and green/park adjacency typically experience quieter evenings and better perceived air comfort. The internal Noise D+ penalty is consistent with a location that may be closer to one of the busier corridors or redevelopment edges, even while still being highly convenient.

Trade-offs and who the city suits

Almada’s profile—especially with an overall Total A+—tends to suit households that value connectivity and “walkable friction reduction,” but it also rewards careful micro-location choices (street orientation, building envelope, and distance to corridors).

Suited to Lisbon-linked professionals who want high coverage of commute options and the ability to switch routes when one corridor is disrupted (aligned with Commute A+).
Suited to car-light households that prefer day-to-day errands on foot (aligned with Amenities A), especially when combined with reliable transit for larger trips.
Suited to families balancing school logistics, particularly where multiple nearby options reduce “single-point-of-failure” mornings (aligned with Childcare & Education A+).
Suited to students and university-linked households near the Caparica campus ecosystem, where term-time life supports a steady weekday rhythm.
Frustrating for noise-sensitive households if the home is near traffic corridors, nightlife strips, or active redevelopment zones (consistent with Noise D+).
Frustrating for those allergic to “infrastructure adjacency” if the immediate surroundings include brownfield edges, heavy vehicle routes, or long-running works (consistent with NIMBY D- and the municipality’s active plan portfolio).
Frustrating for households needing specialist healthcare on short timelines, where proximity does not eliminate system-wide appointment constraints (a general system reality rather than an Almada-specific failure).

Street-level summary box

Scope note: no specific street/neighbourhood coordinates were provided, so this recap describes what the internal accessibility profile most plausibly implies for a well-connected location in Almada, without inventing POI counts or named nearby facilities.

Easiest to access on foot (high likelihood): everyday errands (groceries/cafés/basic services), multiple transport options, and routine health-adjacent needs (pharmacies/clinics/fitness).
Likely to require a short ride rather than a walk: certain specialised services (some administrative tasks, specialist medical consultations, larger-format retail), and some cultural offerings outside the main venue clusters.
Most probable annoyances (based on negative scores): audible traffic or transit noise, and/or proximity to infrastructure, redevelopment or legacy industrial edges that can create visual clutter, heavy vehicle movement, or construction phases.
How to reduce friction in practice: prioritise building acoustic performance (windows, façade condition), bedroom orientation away from corridors, and walking distance to at least two independent commute routes (so disruptions do not collapse the day’s logistics).