Portugal loves to imagine itself as small-but-strategic, a country whose geography gives it just enough leverage to stay relevant between empires, recessions, and its own bouts of self-doubt. Nowhere embodies that contradiction more than Sines, a place where the 15th century and the 21st keep awkwardly brushing shoulders.

On paper, Sines is becoming a continental hinge: a deepwater port between Europe, Africa and Brazil; a landing point for transatlantic cables; a future cluster of data centers, EV-battery production lines, and logistics infrastructure. Nearly 5% of Portugal’s GDP is tied up in projects within a few square kilometers. Minister Manuel Castro Almeida says the region is “at the heart of the transformation of the Portuguese economy.” It sounds sublime: a tiny town of 15,000 on the cusp of a techno-Atlantic rebirth.

But peel back the PR layer, and you find something else — a country repeating an old pattern: chasing global capital while failing to prepare the ground beneath its own feet.

A town built on promises that evaporated

Sines is full of ruins, but they’re not picturesque ruins — they’re ruins of policy. A shuttered power plant. An almost-useful refinery. An industrial dream from the 1970s that collapsed when Portugal lost its colonies and suddenly realized its big petro strategy had been built on political sand.

People in Sines have long memories. They remember the boom that never boomed. They remember their parents arriving for jobs that disappeared. And they see the same script unfolding again: the investment is massive, but the benefits are blurry.

Even now — with Nvidia and Microsoft leasing out data-center floor space, with a Chinese EV-battery giant breaking ground — workers sleep in cars because there’s nowhere to live. Schools can’t absorb more kids. The health center is already overloaded. A developer wants to build 400 apartments but can’t get financing because financing in Portugal almost always goes where there’s already money.

It’s a perfect illustration of Portugal’s development paradox: the country wants to be a tech hub, but still behaves like it’s afraid to build for itself.

The geopolitical layer nobody fully talks about

Sines is not just a local story. It’s a node in a global contest over data, minerals, logistics, and influence.

• China, via CALB, is locking in a strategic foothold in Europe’s EV supply chain.
• The U.S., via Google and Microsoft, is wiring the Atlantic’s digital arteries directly into Portuguese soil.
• Europe wants Sines as a counterweight to Valencia and Algeciras — two ports too close to the politics of the Mediterranean for Brussels’ taste.
• Africa and Brazil see Sines as the closest stable door into Europe’s data economy.

Portugal loves this role — the little country at the crossroads of giants — but it rarely asks the harder question: what exactly does Portugal gain beyond the illusion of relevance?

A future built on cables, but with 20th-century infrastructure

The irony would be funny if it weren’t tragic: Sines is being asked to host one of Europe’s biggest data centers, a facility requiring 1.2 gigawatts of electricity (as much as Lisbon), while there is still no passenger rail line serving the town.

The expressway to Spain — the one thing that would turn Sines into a true Atlantic logistics hub — is half-built, half-forgotten, half-promised. Freight trains still crawl. Housing is a crisis. Public services are stuck in the 1990s.

Only in Portugal do you get a €9 billion data center cooled by seawater drawn from a repurposed power plant — next to a bakery where the woman behind the counter says she hasn’t had a dentist appointment in months because there aren’t enough doctors.

The ghosts of Vasco da Gama — and of development models that never die

Everyone quotes Vasco da Gama in Sines. They point proudly at the statue overlooking the harbor. But the uncomfortable truth is that Portugal still clings to empire-era symbolism to mask present-day stagnation.

Carla Costa at the Grão Douro bakery puts it bluntly: “Government after government tells us they’re investing in Sines, but they’re really investing in foreign businesses… Our buildings are run-down… this place is stuck in time.”

She’s right. The cables, batteries, data clusters — they’re all foreign-owned. Portugal takes the risk (infrastructure, land, energy), while others take the return. It’s a familiar post-imperial pattern: access without agency.

Will it be different this time?

Maybe. Sines has real advantages: deep water, renewable energy, geographic relevance, enormous cable connectivity. The global economy is shifting toward sectors Portugal can, for once, participate in.

But unless the country confronts its structural reflex — to welcome capital while ignoring people — Sines may simply become a 21st-century version of its 1970s self: a big bet built on sand.

The work is not in the data center. The work is in everything around it: housing, transport, health care, schools, logistics, urban planning, workforce training.

Portugal wants to be a tech nation. Sines is the test case.
For now, it’s a place where the future is arriving faster than the country’s ability to absorb it — the Atlantic version of a boomtown running on borrowed time.