In places, national electricity company EDP said it had purposely cut power “for safety reasons”.
At least 40 kilometres of EDP power lines were damaged following the fire, leaving 17 locales without electricity, according to the company.
A statement from EDP’s head of communications, Fernanda Bonifácio, explained more than 30 kilometres of low voltage line were damaged and another 10 kilometres of medium voltage line were also affected by the fire in the Monchique area.
Despite affecting 17 locales, EDP said the number of people affected by the outage was “relatively small”.
In other places EDP purposely cut off electricity at the request of the Civil Protection services, for safety reasons.
Other areas in rural Monchique were also left without mobile telecommunications after the fire affected power supplies.
A NOS spokesperson said the blaze had affected “a mobile site and some of the fixed services”, and on Tuesday the company was awaiting authorisation from the Civil Protection authority to repair the damage caused. However, on Wednesday, the fire was still raging on.
Vodafone also told Lusa News Agency on Tuesday morning that “there are two stations down” in Caldas de Monchique due to a power outage that “could cause service interruptions”.
A spokesperson explained: “We cannot predict when the problem will be solved because we are dependent on others. It’s not that our services have burnt; it’s a lack of power that puts our stations down”.
Altice Portugal said it was “iactively collaborating with all authorities” as its services were also affected, and being “restored and reinforced through a (transportable) Altice Portugal mobile unit, which was promptly activated”.
Parts of Monchique have also been without running water since Monday.
The wildfire broke out last Friday in Monchique, in the Faro district, and according to a review carried out at the start of this week by the Civil Protection authority, it scorched an area of between 15,000 and 20,000 hectares.
By the time of going to press, most outages had been restored.