If you're building a house from scratch or doing renovations that require changes to the outside of the house (anything that changes the facade) in Portugal, you will need to submit project plans for approval to the town council.
If you have architects and a single contractor handling all of the works, both of whom know how to interact with the town council and have agreed to be in charge of submitting and pursuing all your approvals, you do not need to worry about the below. We had to do all of this as our contractor turned out to be more of a foreman than a full contractor - we learnt a lot!
The first step is to get architectural approval for your changes - you should make sure you have architects who are able to manage this process for you.
Once this has been approved, you will need to hand in the projects for all of
your 'specialties' 🔧 🔩🚿🚽
(especialidades
in Portuguese)
such as plumbing, electrical, etc. for approval.
These can be handed in at the same time as your architectural project but if
you have the luxury of time, you are better off getting architectural approval
first (be prepared to wait between 2 and 9 months for approval - ours took
9 months after one rejection of our original roof garden plans).
This means that you can hand that in as soon as it's ready and get
the process started without having to wait for the especialidades to be
completed. If there are any issues with the architecture project, you may need to re-do
the especialidades anyway so the sooner you find out about this the better.
This information is specifically relevant to the kind of work we are doing
and to the Braga town council at the time of writing (2018/2019).
Whereas it may be illustrative of the kind of processes to expect at other
Portuguese town councils, this should not be taken as a given and you must
seek out additional information for yourself (even in Braga).
- Each time you hand anything in, you will need to fill in a
requerimento, i.e a standard form that tells the council what it is you're handing in - Keep hold of all the documents you hand in and keep them handy in an organised folder, they will come in handy, even if only to look up information and process numbers quickly (but most likely because there will be some obscure question that you can't answer but that the clerks at the town council can answer in seconds with your document history)
- At the time of writing, you can find all of these
requerimentoforms in the 'Apoio ao Cidadão' section of the council's website: https://www.cm-braga.pt/pt/0502/municipio/camara-municipal/apoio-ao-cidadao/requerimentos
Finally, be aware that every time you hand in documentation, you will be expected to pay a fee for doing so.
If you do hand in your architectural plans for approval first, you'll get a
letter from the council with a list of projects you need
to hand in (they are not specific to your property) and a deadline by which to do so.
You can find our list here: #36
Getting the documents together was extremely time consuming not only because it's essentially a process of herding cats, but because the Braga town council has some very specific technical rules around the documents, from format to naming conventions (more on these below).
All documents (including the signed and scanned requerimento form)
must be handed in on a CD-ROM as well as a hard copy of the signed requerimento.
Before you are able to hand any of your documents in, the documents on your CD are run through a program to check they meet the technical requirements (see below). If a single one of the documents on your CD fails the technical check, they are all rejected and there is no record of you having attempted to hand these in.
If you have been given a deadline by the council to hand these in, start preparing them well in advance as it's unusual that they all get accepted on the first attempt. This also means that even if you don't have all your documentation ready yet, if you have any doubts about whether the projects you do have being correct, you can take them to the council and get them to check through them (this was very useful for us).
With each of the especialidades you can go one of two ways:
- Present the full project with all of the required support documents (the document
mentioned below which gives you the codes for each document in each area
- plumbing, gas, electrical, fire safety, etc - will be a good guide for expectations)
- Present a request for an exemption for handing in the project
- This does not require a "requerimento" and is a PDF document that you will need an engineer or architect to write for you and include in your CD (even if just to say "This isn't required because no changes are being made")
- You will still need a couple of other support documents from said engineer to prove they are qualified professionals (like insurance and their membership of the 'Ordem de engenheiros' = 'chartered engineers'), but these are standard and they will know which ones they are
- Each one of these will still set you back around €100-150 as they are essentially signing on to be accountable/responsible for the lack of a project (and it's easy 💰)
Check the council's website for technical details and limitations on these.
This is the current link for Braga: https://www.cm-braga.pt/pt/0101/municipio/camara-municipal/apoio-ao-cidadao/operacoes-urbanisticas
More specifically, the normas técnicas: https://www.cm-braga.pt/archive/doc/Normas_Tecnicas_para_Entrega_de_Pedidos_de_Operacoes_Urbanisticas_em_Formato_Digital.pdf
These were the things that caused us to have to go back to the engineers the most often to correct:
- Documents much be in one of two formats:
- PDF**/A** for text documents (including ones that come from you like proof of property ownership)
.dwffor drawings and plans
- Each document must be digitally signed by the responsible architect/engineer
with their personal Portuguese identity card (I don't know how you'd do this with
international architects)
- In Braga, there is one particularity here: this must be a qualified digital signature, which is just an option chosen at the time the signature is added (details for how to do this are in the link above but this caused the most issues for us)
- Plans need to be created with a specific unit of measure ("unidade de metro"), but this shouldn't be an issue for any engineer who has worked with councils previously
- Each file must be given a very specific alphabetical code (list of codes for
each speciality in link above)
- Note that for your
requerimentoyou will need a specific code (REQin our case) and if there is a document you're handing in that is not contained in the council's documentation, there should be a generic code you can use (OPDFin Braga's case)
- Note that for your
- Document names cannot be more than 20 characters and contain no hyphens or special characters.
- Everything on the CD has to be at the root level, no folders to split things out (I kept everything in folders until it was 100% ready and moved docs to the root when I was sure).
You're better off calling the documents only by their codes to avoid problems. Here is a sampling of the 45 documents we handed in:
Note also that a scanned copy of your signed requerimento form
must be included and be in the PDF/A format
(given that it's the paper is signed, it does not have to be digitally signed).
With all of this going on, you'd be forgiven for forgetting to actually open up the documents and check that the details are correct - DON'T Forget!
It's extremely important and we caught errors in around 50% of the documents (mostly tiny typos or incorrect names/ID numbers) that could potentially cause things to be held up for months at the council.
If you don't have AutoCAD (because 💸),
AutoDesk Viewer is a great free tool that
lets you open and check through the .dwf plants.
Once that's all good - and especially if you don't want to spend the next few weeks trapsing back and forth to the town council with what you hope are correct documents - you're going to want to personally check all the technical requirements.
An online PDF validator https://www.pdf-online.com/osa/validate.aspx is useful
to check that documents are in the correct format, but be very aware that by
uploading documents to these kinds of 'free tools' websites you are essentially
handing over all the information contained
within them and they may as well be in the public realm.
Do not use these for documents with personal information.
Even when all of our documents were finally correct and we went to hand everything
in, there was still a small issue with our requerimento form (to do with how
we advise them that certain exemptions had been requested as part of the process)
and I had to make a quick unexpected update to this.
I recommend having a few 'tools' on hand when you go to the council offices so that you can make any changes 'on the fly' as opposed to having to go home to make changes, burn a CD and come back again (particularly if you're on a deadline):
- If you have one, your laptop where you have compiled the documents (this is also useful to allow you to check documents they ask you about as well)
- Extra printed out copies of the blank
requerimentoform in case you've made a mistake here - An app on your phone that allows you to take photos of documents and makes them look like they have been scanned (search for 'scanner app' and try a couple of free ones before you go)
- PDF to PDF/A converter like https://www.pdftron.com/pdf-tools/pdfa-converter/ (remember that all documents on your CD need to be in this format so you'll need to convert your 'scanned' document to PDF/A)
- If you have a laptop with you:
- Portable CD writer: https://amzn.to/2JRpxvG - this is just an example, you can pick them up pretty inexpensively in many places
- Extra blank CDs for re-burning the document CDs right there (multiples; their software was taking too long to load the first CD I gave them and they were about to turn me away when I just handed them a fresh one I'd burned in the meantime)
All of this will also make you look like a technical badass because no one else there will be considering time efficiency to this level 💃😂