Lisbon Shore Power and the €2 Cruise Tax: €981,493 Raised in 2025, a €20M Plug Not Yet Connected

The tax: what the rules say

Lisbon calls it the Taxa de Chegada por Via Marítima. Lusa's description, printed by Observador on 13 June 2025, is a fixed unit value of €2 per passenger over 13 who disembarks from a cruise ship in transit at the terminals in the municipality. It has been collected in the port since 1 April 2024.

The tax is a modality of the Taxa Municipal Turística in the city's general fees regulation, the Regulamento Geral de Taxas, Preços e Outras Receitas do Município de Lisboa. A CML municipal bulletin records the council's proposal 452/2024, the Municipal Assembly's deliberation 453/AML/2024 of 23 July 2024 and publication of the seventh amendment as Aviso 18684/2024/2 in the Diário da República of 26 August 2024. We could not open the Diário da República page, so those numbers rest on the bulletin. The statutory basis cited in the regulation is Lei 73/2013 and Lei 53-E/2006. Our earlier statement that we found no regulation was therefore wrong. What we had found was the collection arrangement, a protocol that APL and the council signed on 21 December 2023, under which APL collects through its Janela Única Logística platform and passes the money to the city. Operators were billed at booking from 1 January 2024, and collection at the port became effective on 1 April.

A sea-arrival tax existed before. The city's 2014 regulation set a €1 tax on arrivals by sea and air. DN and Lusa reported on 19 July 2018 that it had "never actually been collected", that the airport operator ANA paid €3.8 million in 2015 and then refused to continue, and that the council planned to remove it. The council's own page describes the 2024 change as a rise from €1 to €2. So the €2 is the first cruise levy collected, and the first at that rate, but not the first on paper. When €2 started to apply is contested. Observador and Lusa describe €2 from 1 April 2024, while the amendment approved in July and published in August 2024 describes the step from €1 to €2, which the council page says took effect the day after publication, around 27 August 2024 (derived). We cannot say which rate applied from April to August.

The texts also differ on who pays. A version of Article 74 held by the Assembly says the tax is due per passenger who disembarks from a cruise ship in call, with no age rule. The August 2024 proposal says "in transit", exempts under-13s and keeps a 50% reduction "to be reviewed after one year". Press accounts consistently say over 13. We could not read the consolidated text, so we cannot say whether the 50% reduction ever applied. If it did, the rate was not a flat €2, and the receipts puzzle below gets harder.

There is no earmark. Observador said on 1 April 2024 that the money goes to the city's urban hygiene department and on 13 June 2025 that it reinforces cleaning. Lusa reported in August 2024 that about €8 million a year of the city's total tourist-tax income is committed to urban hygiene, and the proposal text states no binding allocation. No source ties the levy to shore power or any other environmental spending. The link in public debate dates to 20 June 2023, when Mayor Carlos Moedas told the Municipal Assembly that APL must electrify the terminal and that cruise ships should pay the tourist tax. The wider municipal picture is in our Portugal tourist taxes analysis.

What the receipts show

Three receipt figures exist. Lusa, citing council data, reported €365,920 for the first year of collection, April to December 2024, and €309,397 for January to May 2025 on 13 June 2025. Diário de Notícias reported €981,493 for 2025 on 2 March 2026, in a survey of municipal tourist-tax receipts. That article gives Lisbon's 2025 income as €82.2 million from the overnight tax and €981,493 from the cruise tax, and does not say who supplied the split. DN credits its own survey, to which 39 of 46 charging municipalities replied, and the council for explaining the rise. We treat the split as DN-reported and probably council-supplied. None of the three is a published account. We did not reach a Conta de Gerência, Assembly minutes or open data on it.

Subtracting the two reports gives €672,096 for June to December 2025 (derived), against €309,397 for the first five months. That is about €96,000 a month against about €62,000 in the first period, which fits a cruise season that peaks from spring to autumn. The 2025 figure is 98% of the mayor's pre-launch estimate of about €1 million and 82% of the €1.2 million forecast (derived).

The table sets 2025 receipts against what €2 would raise on each possible base, using APL's passenger series. The receipts are 2.4 times the ceiling for turnaround passengers alone, so the tax cannot have been raised only on people who start or end a voyage in Lisbon. They are 98.3% of the ceiling for transit passengers and 69.6% of the ceiling for all passengers. At €2 a head the receipts imply 490,747 payers (derived), almost every transit passenger the port counted. Some transit passengers stay aboard, and some are under 13. Three explanations are consistent with the figures. Operators may be billed on passenger lists at booking, as Presstur reported for the start of 2024, and not on who steps ashore. Some turnaround passengers may be taxed as well. Or the rate and base may differ from the press description. We cannot choose between them. The figure that would settle it is the monthly receipt by ship call, which no one has published.

The levy is small against the tax around it. The €981,493 is 1.18% of the €83.2 million the city collected in 2025 from both taxes (derived), and the 2024 figure is 0.74% of that year's €49.51 million. Our earlier article repeated a report that Público put the levy at about 0.3% of tourist-tax revenue. We could not open that Público page, and neither year's share reproduces it. €1 million against 2023's €40.24 million would have been 2.5%. The total itself fell €4.3 million short of the €87.5 million the city budgeted for 2025, and the cruise levy equals about a quarter of that shortfall (derived).

Four cruise levies, one rate

Lisbon, Funchal and Matosinhos charge €2 and the Azores charge €3. The rate is set; the base is not. Funchal exempts children up to 12 and passengers whose final destination is Funchal. The Azores tax applies to non-residents aged 10 or over who disembark. Matosinhos taxes each disembarking passenger. Only the Azores publishes receipts with an institution behind them: €382,479 billed for 2025, €266,277 received by May 2026 and 127,493 taxable passengers. Lisbon's reported 2025 figure is 2.6 times the Azores billing on 4.5 times the passengers. The island view is in our Azores cruise statistics.

Funchal forecast €1.2 million for 2025 from 600,000 passengers. DN Madeira ran "almost €2 million" on 10 March 2026 and said more than 1.2 million passengers had contributed. The page is a paywalled teaser and gives no period. The arithmetic says the period is longer than 2025: APRAM counted 746,257 passengers in the calendar year, and €2 million on that base would be €2.68 a passenger, above the rate. The comparison with Funchal's own figures is in Madeira cruise statistics.

Matosinhos has charged €2 per disembarking passenger since 1 January 2025 under a regulation published in the Diário da República on 6 December 2024 and amended on 30 December 2025. Receipts are unpublished. The ceiling on the 223,603 passengers APDL counted from January to November 2025 is about €447,000 (derived), and the full picture of the terminal is in our Leixões cruise analysis. The number 1414/2024 we cited there did not match the consolidated text, so we cite the Diário da República issue.

Abroad, Portuguese rates are at the low end. Greece has charged €20 per disembarking passenger at Santorini and Mykonos in peak months since 21 July 2025 (CruiseMapper), and Barcelona charges €11 on short calls. Lisbon's €2 is a tenth of Santorini's peak fee. Those are trade summaries, not the regulations.

The plug: Lisbon's shore-power project

The physical work has two parts. E-Redes is building an underground 60 kV line from Alto de São João to the cruise terminal area. Works began in June 2025 with completion estimated for January 2027 (Região de Lisboa, 6 August 2025). A new substation designed by Carrilho da Graça and built by Quadrante was reported under way by ECO in October 2024. APL says it will serve three cruise ships at once at medium voltage. Chairman Carlos Correia says it would cut berthed ships' greenhouse-gas emissions by about 77% against 2019, a design claim with no published method.

The latest status comes from a Portugal Mobi Summit article of 9 February 2026. It describes about €20 million for the launch period, €2.7 million spent on the high-voltage line and the design of the main substation and internal network, a substation and grid connection "in principle" by the end of 2026, works concluded in 2027 and the system operating in early 2029. The project covers six terminals, five cargo terminals and the cruise terminal, and later phases are to be paid by concessionaires. Jornal Económico on 31 March 2026 is the last report we found, and it gives no amounts. We found no tender, contract award, power rating in megavolt-amperes or named list of berths in the Diário da República, the public-contracts portal or the press. No report says a ship has connected.

Some of the versions reconcile. The €18.3 million approved in June 2024 with up to €14.5 million of support is a 79% aid intensity (derived), the €20 million of July 2025 is a later or rounded phase one, and the €10 million second phase is meant for the cargo terminals. Two do not. APL's own website in September 2024 gave €31 million to electrify the cruise terminal with operation in 2026. The €4.27 million and 4.4 kilometres in our earlier table could not be reproduced in the article we found for that date, which gives no amount. The completion year runs from 2026 to 2029 across sources, and each date marks a different milestone.

Politics ran ahead of the engineering. In June 2023 the transport minister's working group of ministry, council, APL and E-Redes set out to finish before 2026. On 27 January 2026 PCP councillor João Ferreira wrote that after four years under council proposal 134/CM/2022 he had no information on the process or a completion date. We found no reply.

Elsewhere in Portugal the picture is thinner. Leixões plans operation in 2029 at up to 16 MVA, with 8 MVA in the first phase. ECO reported on 16 October 2026 that €12.2 million of calls for funding had been opened, €7.19 million under Sustentável 2030 and €5 million under Norte 2030 for the cruise terminal and solar panels, with no awards yet. Funchal has finished a feasibility study and is seeking money. Madeira's ferry Lobo Marinho connected on 24 October 2025 as the first ship in Portugal to use shore power, on a €3.6 million PRR project that projects savings above 3,200 tonnes of CO2 a year. Lisbon will not be first, though a ferry is not a cruise ship. In Spain, Barcelona awarded €12.2 million in July 2025 for its first cruise shore power at the MSC terminal, due in 2027, so the plug is rare at the largest cruise ports too. Sources disagree on how many ships can connect at all, from 52% to 60% of the fleet today.

What regulation will force

The deadline that matters is 1 January 2030. The EU's Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation, 2023/1804, obliges ports in the TEN-T network to supply shore power to at least 90% of calls by large cruise and container ships, according to the Transport & Environment explainer of July 2023, which gives a threshold of 25 cruise calls a year. FuelEU Maritime, Regulation 2023/1805, requires passenger and container ships above 5,000 gross tonnes to use shore power at those berths from the same date for stays over two hours, with exemptions for emergencies, unavailable supply and approved zero-emission technology. We could not read the EUR-Lex text, which returned metadata only, and secondary sources disagree on the thresholds by ship type. We also could not confirm whether Lisbon is a core or a comprehensive TEN-T port, which decides how it is covered. Treat both as reported, not read.

Carbon and sulphur rules already apply. Under the EU Emissions Trading System, shipping companies surrender allowances for 40% of 2024 emissions, 70% of 2025 and 100% of 2026, and BIMCO says berth emissions count in full. A cruise ship in Lisbon therefore already pays for the CO2 it emits at the quay in 2026. Directive 2016/802 limits fuel at berth in EU ports to 0.10% sulphur, with exemptions for stays under two hours and for ships that switch off all engines and use shore-side electricity. The plug's sulphur gain is therefore smaller than its gain in nitrogen oxides, particles and CO2. No sulphur emission control area covers Portuguese waters today, so ships at sea are held to the global 0.50% cap. The IMO adopted a North-East Atlantic area on 1 May 2026, in force from 1 September 2027 with the 0.10% limit from 1 September 2028, and Gard reports it reaches south to Spain and Portugal. We did not verify the boundary against the resolution.

What the ships emit and what is measured

The best-known data are Transport & Environment's, from its June 2023 report on 2022. It counted 108 cruise ships at Lisbon, up from 101 in 2019, and 11,132 kilograms of sulphur oxides, which ranked Lisbon fifth in Europe against eighth in 2019. The same table has 278,217 kilograms of nitrogen oxides, 4,766 kilograms of fine particles and 18.96 thousand tonnes of CO2, with ships spending 5,407 hours around the port. Barcelona topped the sulphur ranking at 18,280 kilograms and 56,802 tonnes of CO2. The report counts ships, not calls. It covers ships above 5,000 gross tonnes, defines "around port" as within 12 nautical miles at under three knots, and excluded ships that stayed more than 80 consecutive hours at berth.

Sulphur is the most alarming of the three pollutants. T&E equates Lisbon's cruise sulphur with 2.44 times that of the city's registered cars. For nitrogen oxides the ratio is 0.12 and for fine particles 0.01. The ranking is repeated loosely: Diário de Notícias wrote in September 2024 that Lisbon was among the five most polluted ports without a source or year, and Dinheiro Vivo called the data 2023. It is for 2022 and for sulphur only. T&E said in July 2025 that Lisbon was one of four ports with no shore-power investment, and APL replied that the data were old and the projects under way.

Measured air quality is thinner. A study by CLIA and the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, released through APL in November 2023, found the cruise impact on sulphur dioxide and particles "minimal" over September 2022 to September 2023. Coverage names no stations and no concentrations, the industry commissioned it and we could not find the study. A master's internship report written at APL for the engineering school ISEL in November 2024 concluded that cruise ships have a negative effect that does not degrade air quality significantly, with road traffic the main source. Its numbers did not extract. The regional environment authority's 2023 assessment found that Avenida da Liberdade exceeded the annual nitrogen dioxide limit of 40 micrograms per cubic metre and attributes about 12% of nitrogen oxides and 10% of coarse particles in the municipality to maritime transport. Those are inventory shares for all shipping, not measured cruise contributions. No independent body has published a cruise-attributable concentration. APL says it has run a real-time ship emission monitoring network since 2019 and has published none of its data.

Local limits have not followed. Council proposal 134/CM/2022, passed unanimously according to the PCP request, committed the city to shore power, restrictions on berthing by fuel and emissions, and a health study. Our earlier article attributed it to the Municipal Assembly, which was wrong. No berthing limit, cruise cap or noise limit has been confirmed.

Emissions versus revenue: a model built on published inputs

To compare the two ledgers we estimate the CO2 that full shore power would avoid in Lisbon in a year. The formula is calls times hours at berth times hotel load times the gap between a ship's emission factor and the grid's. The calls are APL's 335 for 2025. The ship factor is 645 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour for marine gas oil in auxiliary engines, from a 2015 Copenhagen port report. The grid factor is 117.2 grams per kilowatt-hour for Portugal in 2025 from Electricity Maps, a private lifecycle estimate that sits uneasily against a combustion factor. The difference is 0.5278 tonnes per megawatt-hour. For the hotel load we use 5.5 megawatts, the Baltic Interreg planning average, up to the 7 to 11 megawatts Copenhagen reports for ships in port. APL publishes no average berth time. CruiseMapper's typical 8 am to 5 pm call implies seven to nine hours, and T&E's 5,407 hours over APL's 327 calls in 2022 gives 16.5 hours a call, an upper bound that includes slow sailing near the port. The carbon price is €88 a tonne, the EU allowance price on 12 October 2026 reported by GMK Center from ICE data.

The central case avoids about 11,100 tonnes of CO2 a year, worth €0.98 million at €88. That equals the 2025 tax receipts to within €1,300, which is arithmetic coincidence and not a finding. The range is wide, from 6,800 tonnes and €0.60 million to 32,100 tonnes and €2.82 million, because hours and load are assumptions.

Against the cost, the central value takes about 20 years to recover €20 million, 33 years in the low case and seven years in the high case. That is about €1,800 of capital per annual tonne avoided in the central case (derived). The €2.7 million spent equals 2.8 years of 2025 tax receipts, and the full €20 million equals 20.4 years. These figures flatter the plug as a carbon investment, because they ignore the electricity ships will buy and the fuel they save. They also ignore the ETS, which already prices the CO2 the plug removes, so the €0.98 million is a valuation and not income to anyone in Lisbon. The model assumes every call connects. Phase one serves three ships at once, regulation requires only 90% of calls from 2030, and not every ship can connect. Boilers are a separate at-berth source that an auxiliary-engine load does not cover (ICCT, October 2023). Nobody has published the number that would replace the assumptions: APL's measured berth hours and connected load by ship.

What this means for travelers, businesses and analysts

Travelers. A cruise passenger over 13 who steps off in Lisbon is reported to pay €2, collected by the operator or APL, and hotel and restaurant prices are unaffected. Cruise ships will keep running engines or boilers at the quay until the plug works, which on APL's own schedule is early 2029 and on the EU's is 1 January 2030. The cleaner-air case for the city is road traffic, which the regional assessment names as the main source, and the area around Avenida da Liberdade exceeded the nitrogen dioxide limit in 2023. For a first visit, our Lisbon travel guide covers where to stay and what has changed.

Tourism businesses and investors. The structural point is the base. On the press wording the tax falls on transit passengers, and transit fell 15.6% in 2025 to 499,211 while turnaround passengers reached a record. At €2, the loss of 92,586 transit passengers removes €185,172 of ceiling (derived), and every extra turnaround passenger adds nothing to the levy, though each is worth far more to hotels and airports. Anyone modelling the levy as a growth line should expect it to move with the transit count. The plug is a cost to APL and, from 2030, a compliance requirement for operators. The thresholds that would change this view are a published monthly receipt by call, a contract award with a megavolt-ampere rating, and the first connected ship.

Journalists and analysts. The safe figures are the three receipts, €365,920 for April to December 2024, €309,397 for January to May 2025 and €981,493 for 2025, each attributed to the council through Lusa or DN, and T&E's 2022 table. Do not write that Lisbon publishes no receipts, that the tax is about 0.3% of the tourist tax, that it funds shore power, that Lisbon is the first Portuguese port with shore power, that Lisbon was fifth most polluted on 2023 data, or that shore power costs €4.27 million. The series finding is that Lisbon, Funchal and Matosinhos all charge €2 and only the Azores publish billing and collection by institution. A published collection rate for Lisbon would test whether the €1.97 per transit passenger reflects who pays or who is billed.