Home security work in the Algarve covers four jobs that are usually quoted together: CCTV, which is cameras and a recorder; an alarm, which is detectors and a siren that reaches your phone; door entry, meaning a video intercom or a video doorbell; and locks, from a new cylinder to an electronic one. Handyman Algarve quotes home security work in the Algarve for free, in English or Portuguese, and as of 2026 the quote is given before anything is ordered.
Where the cameras are allowed to point
This is the question that decides the layout, and it is worth answering before the shopping. In Portugal a private household system needs no permit. The CNPD, the national data protection authority, states plainly that using video cameras to protect people and property in your own home is legitimate and requires no authorisation of any kind.
What the CNPD's guidance regulates is the view. The CNPD's own guidance says the cameras have to be installed on the property of the person responsible for them, that they may not be aimed at neighbouring property or at other places that are not that person's exclusive property, and that they may not capture images of shared routes such as a right of way. It says they may capture only what is strictly necessary to cover the accesses to the building, and that they may not look onto public roads, which it spells out as including the areas where people walk, on the pavement or in the street. Source: CNPD, Videovigilância por vizinhos, read in September 2026.
The legal restriction behind that is article 19.º of Lei n.º 58/2019 of 8 August, which the CNPD points to. Its n.º 2 a) says cameras may not cover public roads, neighbouring properties or other places not in the exclusive domain of the person responsible, except as far as is strictly necessary to cover the accesses to the building. The same article, at n.º 4, prohibits capturing sound where video surveillance is permitted, except while the watched premises are closed or with the CNPD's prior authorisation. Many consumer cameras record audio by default, so that is a setting to check on the day it is fitted rather than a year later.
In a building with shared parts the answer changes. The CNPD states that in a condominium there has to be express consent from all residents for a video surveillance system to operate, and gives the example that one neighbour may not, on their own initiative, put cameras on the landing, in the parking area, or in the corridor to the storage rooms, where other people pass.
One more thing worth knowing, because it is what actually happens when a neighbour objects. The CNPD says it cannot enter a private home to check what a system is filming without a judicial warrant, and that where it is evident a camera is capturing images of somebody else's property, with a risk of intruding on their private life, that person can make a criminal complaint to the Ministério Público. A camera aimed carefully is not only a legal question, then. It is what keeps a disagreement with a neighbour from becoming a case.
All of that is about a household system. A shop, a rented property with staff, or a system covering a condominium's common parts is a different regime, and the answer there comes from the CNPD rather than from an installer.
CCTV installation
A camera system is designed from the approaches, not from the walls. The useful exercise is to walk the plot the way somebody uninvited would, and put a position where that route narrows: the gate, the side passage, the back of the house where the boundary is lowest. A camera on every elevation looks thorough and often watches nothing.
Two technical choices decide the rest. Cable or wireless: power over ethernet gives one cable per camera for both video and power, and it is the more reliable of the two, but it needs a route back to a recorder, and in a masonry villa that route is the work. And where the footage lives: a recorder in the house, a card in the camera, or a cloud account, which is the one that can carry a monthly fee. Ask which of the three you are being quoted, because it changes what the system costs after the first year.
The details that decide whether a system is any use are unglamorous. Mounting height, so a face is captured rather than the top of a hat. Night performance checked on a dark night, not at dusk. A recorder somewhere a thief would not find first. And the password changed from the factory one, which is how a camera system ends up watched by somebody other than its owner.
Alarm installation
An alarm is detectors, a panel and a way of telling you. What varies is the last part. A system can sound a siren and send a notification to your phone and nothing more, or it can report to a monitoring centre on a monthly contract. Both are alarms and only one of them is a subscription, and a house that is empty for months at a time is exactly where that distinction is worth thinking about rather than defaulting.
The rest is placement. Detectors go where an intruder has to pass rather than where a window is, which usually means a hallway and a stair rather than every room. Pets, curtains that move in a draught and a heater or a boiler cycling on near a detector are the usual false-alarm causes, and they are handled at the design stage by choosing the detector type, not afterwards by turning the sensitivity down. On a holiday home the useful question is not how loud the siren is. It is who is going to hear it, and what happens next.
Where a system needs a new circuit, a spur or any work on the fixed electrical installation, that is electrical work and it goes to an electrician in the Algarve rather than to a security fitter.
Video doorbells and intercoms
Three different things get called the same name. A video doorbell replaces the bell push at the door and needs power there plus a wireless signal that reaches it, which is the part that fails on a thick stone wall. A video intercom is wired between a gate or a door station and a handset inside, and it is the right answer where the entrance is at the road and the house is up a drive. And an existing intercom can usually be replaced using the cable already in the wall, which keeps the job small.
The Algarve detail is the distance. A gate on the road with the house set back means a cable run along or under the drive, and that run is the thing to price honestly at the start. Where a wired run is genuinely impossible, a wireless gate station exists, but it needs power at the gate and it is the option to reach for second.
Smart locks and door hardware
An electronic lock is a cylinder or a whole lock case that opens with a code, a phone or a fob instead of a key, and on a property that gets handed between guests, cleaners and a keyholder it solves a real problem: a code can be changed, and a key that has been copied cannot be uncopied. What it does not do is make a weak door strong. The lock is one part of a door, and the frame, the hinges, the strike plate and the door leaf are the rest of it.
Two practical points before choosing one. It needs a power source, and the question to ask is what happens when the battery dies, because the good ones take an emergency supply or keep a mechanical key override. And it should not be the only way in, on a house where somebody may need to get in without a phone.
Locks, cylinders and lockouts on their own are the locksmith service, and grilles, gates and anything welded are metalwork.
