This paper describes the realization of the schwa in European Portuguese, using a system of automatic phones recognition as method of analysis. The approach is based on the analysis of the sequence of phones with maximum likelihood, assuming different phonetic realizations of the schwa (such as ([@], [Ø] and [i]: SAMPA). In this study 22,627 phrases from 208 read sentences (about 31.5 hours of speech) were examined. The presence of the schwa [@] versus schwa-deletion [Ø] and versus schwa switching with the phone [i] was examined in the utterances. This analysis generated linguistic information supported by a statistical analysis of the frequency of the schwa occurrence and its phonetic realization. From the results, we could conclude that [@], [Ø] and [i] are /@/ allophones. However, although some restrictions to the multi realization of schwa were observed we did not find any rule witch systematically renders [@], [Ø] and [i] obligatory.