The paper focuses on the foundation piles of a very large industrial plant located in the peninsula of Setúbal, Portugal. The ground is composed by a thick deposit of Pliocene sands and silty sands, with the water table close to the surface. Bored piles drilled under bentonite slurry of diameters from 0.5 m to 1.0 m were adopted with lengths up to 22 m. The site was carefully characterized. A number of static and dynamic axial load tests on prototype piles were carried out, providing the evaluation of the base and the shaft resistance. The results of these tests are discussed and compared with the ones obtained from a semi-empirical method based on in situ ground tests.