Yesterday, the Regional Government launched a public tender for rehabilitating 92 homes in the Nascer do Sol neighborhood, located next to the Lajes Base.
The work, which has a deadline of 450 days (about a year and three months), was put out to tender for a base price of 12.1 million euros (plus VAT), with funding provided by the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR).
Interested parties have 30 days to submit bids and are obliged to keep them for 180 days.
In October 2023, the vice president of the Regional Government, Artur Lima, who was in charge of housing at the time, announced that the government intended to rehabilitate 92 homes in the Nascer do Sol neighborhood. The US Air Force had ceded the neighborhood to the Portuguese government and later transferred it to the region.
“In the next few days we expect to launch the procedure for the execution projects for this contract and launch the rehabilitation contract in the first half of 2024,” said Artur Lima at the time, predicting that the work would be completed ‘by December 2025’.
The rehabilitation work on the 92 three- and four-bedroom houses was budgeted at 5 million euros.
This involved maintaining the buildings and adapting them to energy efficiency and the water and electricity systems, which were the same as those used in the United States of America.
In 2015, when it reduced the number of personnel at Lajes Base, the US Air Force stopped using two neighborhoods, “Nascer do Sol” and “Beira-Mar,” which had around 450 houses and a school of around 5,200 square meters.
The infrastructure was handed over in 2018 to the Regional Government, then led by the PS. The government planned to set up a technology business hub in the old school and restore the houses to house programmers as part of Terceira Tech Island, but the work never went ahead.
In 2019, the Azorean parliament approved a recommendation from the Left Bloc for the government to include part of the houses in social housing and in the rent-controlled market.
In 2023, Artur Lima said that the planned rehabilitation had “nothing to do with the Left Bloc’s proposal” and that the houses would be rented out with an option to buy.

The vice-president of the Regional Government said that the PSD/CDS/PPM executive, who took office for a first term in 2020, inherited housing that had not yet been registered.
“They didn’t even have security. They allowed almost the entire Beira-Mar neighborhood to be destroyed, vandalized and robbed. What remains to be done is to register legally, make the subdivision and then register it in the name of the Autonomous Region of the Azores,” he pointed out, stressing that the process was ‘time-consuming’.
The registration process for the 92 homes that will now be rehabilitated took “two years.”
“We’ve already completed the registration and allotment process. It was a very difficult process. We had to register each house, each plot, and now it’s to be registered in the name of the Autonomous Region of the Azores. These are the legal procedures required,” he explained.
The executive vice president said that the remaining houses in the Nascer do Sol and Beira-Mar neighborhoods would be rehabilitated in a second phase in 2023, and part of them would be used to attract qualified employees to Terceira.
“The former American school is a complex with very good infrastructure that could be used for projects to attract people in the field of science and technology,” he said.
In 2023, Marcos Couto, president of the Angra do Heroísmo Chamber of Commerce, announced that the business association would take over management of Terceira Tech Island and intended to use the old infrastructure to establish companies and a business school.

In Correio dos Açores–José Lourenço, director

Translated to English as a community outreach program from the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI) and the Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures Department (MCLL) as part of Bruma Publication and ADMA (Azores-Diaspora Media Alliance) at California State University, Fresno, PBBI thanks Luso Financial for sponsoring NOVIDADES.