Court lets Lisbon housing protest keep a tent overnight until 24 November

Court allows overnight camping

The Administrative Court of Lisbon ruled in favour of activist Renata Cambra, who had sued to keep a tent standing overnight at the Rossio camp. The decision became known on Monday, 2 November, and lets the protest continue past the 00:30 cut-off until 24 November, the day the 2027 budgets are due to be voted on. The judge rejected police use of an August 1974 decree banning street demonstrations after 00:30 as a justification for clearing the camps, calling the cut-off an absolute and automatic limit on a fundamental right. She also told police to refrain from dispersal measures as long as the protest stays peaceful. Earlier clearances in Lisbon and Porto ended in baton charges, with more than two dozen people injured, including officers.

Police and the carnations

Officers in Porto and Lisbon accepted carnations offered by protesters and pinned them to their uniforms. In Porto this happened on Saturday, 31 October, hours before a police charge that left several people detained and injured, police among them. In Lisbon it happened on Monday, 2 November, when a florist handing out flowers at Praça D. Pedro IV was approached by officers who attached them near the shoulder. Force regulations ban unauthorised additions to the uniform, but the PSP called the gesture individual and spontaneous. Sérgio Soares, speaking for the PSP, described the carnation as a traditional gesture deeply rooted in the country's culture and history, and said it neither amounted to indiscipline nor compromised institutional neutrality.

Housing demands and the rent law

The camps are pressing for a reversal of the new rental law, a brake on property funds buying homes, and rent ceilings that are truly affordable. The statement came after Defence Minister Nuno Melo, in an interview with Público and Rádio Renascença on 21 October, called the accents of some camp spokespeople curious and asked whether they meant the housing crisis came from uncontrolled immigration. On Wednesday, 4 November, the Acampada de Lisboa posted on social media that it rejected what it called a xenophobic insinuation. The movement wrote:

“Housing is a right. Protesting is too. Neither of the two has nationality.”

The movement also accused the government of using threats, intimidation and xenophobic speech to silence protests. Secretary of State Rui Armindo Freitas had warned about foreigners taking part in demonstrations. At a popular assembly on the evening of Wednesday, 4 November, protesters voted to join a demonstration against a hotel planned at the Graça barracks.

Unions, empty homes and the city's proposal

Camps in Lisbon, Porto, Faro and Coimbra have sent an open letter to all workers in Portugal, to the CGTP-IN national council and its secretary-general Tiago Oliveira, and to UGT's statutory bodies and secretary-general Mário Mourão. The letter asks the unions to declare public support, attend camp assemblies and take housing demands into their own campaigns. It calls the government stubborn and says it is ignoring the streets. An opinion column in SAPO cites 2021 census figures of more than 700,000 empty homes nationwide, over 40% of them in the Lisbon, Porto and Setúbal districts, and nearly 50,000 in Lisbon municipality. On 5 November, the Lisbon mayor's office proposed that Renata Cambra keep one symbolic tent at Rossio during the Christmas market and move the rest of the protest to Largo de São Domingos, Martim Moniz or Restauradores.

Key dates

The timeline below runs from the start of the Porto camp on 10 October to the end of the court-allowed overnight period on 24 November.

The Christmas market, due to open at Rossio on 13 November, falls inside the period the court has now allowed the camps to stay.