Festival Big Bang turns 15 at Lisbon's Centro Cultural de Belém, with Friday 2 October for schools and Saturday 3 October for families. Tickets are €4.50 (€5 for Main Auditorium shows) and some activities are free.

Festival Big Bang, at Lisbon's Centro Cultural de Belém, is back for its 15th edition on Friday 2 and Saturday 3 October. Friday is for schools and Saturday is family day, with programming across several spaces and times. Saturday tickets cost €4.50, or €5 for shows in the Main Auditorium. Cloudbusting is a concert of about 20 minutes for ages 6 and up. Belgian singer Aline Goffin takes a voice, a mini guitar and a pair of drumsticks through Kate Bush's…

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Festival Cuca Monga takes over the Palácio Pimenta gardens, Amazonas Market sets up in Marvila, and the Feira Nacional de Vinil de Benfica reaches its 10th edition, free to attend.

Three days, three very different options for anyone sticking around Lisbon this weekend. Top billing goes to Festival Cuca Monga, which takes over the gardens of Palácio Pimenta, home to the Museu de Lisboa, in Campo Grande today and tomorrow, from 6pm to 2am, with two stages of Portuguese indie music, food stalls and band merchandise. Tickets are €32. On Saturday and Sunday, Marvila hosts Amazonas Market at number 8, with around 70 stalls selling…

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The 67th edition runs 7 to 11 October, with the shows spread across four venues from the 8th. Carlos Gil's show on Saturday 10 starts inside the MUDE design museum and spills onto Rua Augusta, with a limited number of public seats and registration opening on 5 October.

A fashion week normally offers outsiders one option, which is to watch it on a screen. In October there is an exception, and it happens in the middle of Rua Augusta. Carlos Gil's show begins inside the MUDE design museum and pushes out through the doors onto a stretch of the busiest pedestrian street in Lisbon. Saturday 10 October, 3pm. Unlike every other show on the calendar, it has seats for the public: the organisers open mandatory registration on 5…

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Web Summit runs at Lisbon's MEO Arena from 9 to 12 November. A general pass is €995, but the organisers' own volunteer programme hands out free tickets to people willing to work the floor, with access to the talks on time off.

There are two ways to be inside the MEO Arena in November. One of them costs €995. Web Summit is back in Lisbon from 9 to 12 November, and the price list is already up. A general attendee pass sits at €995, marked down from a list price of €1,595. VIP is €1,950. At the top there is a Chairperson ticket at €24,950, which buys meeting space, fast-tracked entry and the speaker lounge — twenty-five general tickets, for the same four days. The second way costs…

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Merchants, tournaments and processions take over the castle and the old town from 25 to 27 September, with the re-enactment set in the year 1348. A day ticket is 5 euros, three days is 10, and under-13s go free.

The year is 1348 and King Afonso IV has decided to call on the town and castle of Palmela, bringing the queen and Prince Pedro with him. That is the scenario this year's re-enactment is built around, and everything else hangs off it — the council has confirmed the dates as 25 to 27 September, Friday to Sunday, with the Friday opening at five in the afternoon.

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Fennesz plays with the Sinfonietta de Braga, Marta Salogni brings a co-commissioned piece to a seminary chapel, and the festival opens with a surprise concert in a basilica. The day-by-day programme is out, and the dates are 22 to 25 October.

Seven of them carry an asterisk, which is how the festival marks a piece nobody has heard anywhere yet. Semibreve returns to Braga from 22 to 25 October with seven world premieres — the full set is flagged on the official line-up, and they belong to João Carlos Pinto, Malcolm Pardon and Gustaf Broms, Nuno Canavarro and Bruno Miguel Pinto, PYUR and Tarik Barri, Qasim Naqvi and Steven Wendt, Ricardo Jacinto, and System Sophie.

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European Heritage Days run from 18 to 27 September, with activities in almost every district and much of it free. Here is what is happening between Friday and Sunday, from a hospital ship in Viana do Castelo to a wine press cut into bare rock.

Friday opens the European Heritage Days in Portugal, and for ten days a lot of buildings that normally keep their doors shut will not. This year's theme is "Reviver, resistir, reinventar" — revive, resist, reinvent. The practical part is that the national programme runs from 18 to 27 September, covers almost every district, and is free more often than not. This is the first of its two weekends.

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The Portuguese Grand Prix is confirmed on the world championship calendar for 2027 and 2028. The race runs 18-20 June at the Autódromo Internacional do Algarve in Portimão, and the first of four ticket phases opens on 21 September.

There is a date. The Portuguese Grand Prix returns to the Formula 1 calendar and the race weekend is set for 18-20 June 2027 at the Autódromo Internacional do Algarve in Portimão. Confirmation landed on Wednesday, and it covers more than one season: the agreement between Formula 1 and the Algarve circuit runs through 2028 as well. Portugal has not hosted a championship round since 2021. That was the second of two consecutive visits, in 2020 and 2021, and…

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Porto Santo's Columbus Festival runs 17 to 20 September in Vila Baleira, from 3pm to 11pm, free to enter. Around 58 performances, three concerts, daily parades, and a landing re-enactment on the Thursday.

When we wrote about the Columbus Festival a fortnight ago, one thing was still missing: the day-by-day programme, which the organisers only publish close to the date. It is out now, and it is bigger than last year's. Roughly 58 performances are spread across the four days. Twenty-five of them are musical, sixteen are dance and eleven are something else entirely, from fire shows to street theatre and juggling. On top of that there are three concerts, on…

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Edgar Pêra's Guerrilha no Asfalto works from the testimony of a former FP-25 operative. The festival's 24th edition runs in Lisbon from 15 to 25 October, and the first Portuguese titles are out, including a portrait of the fado singer Carminho.

This year's Doclisboa opens with a film that starts in a book and ends somewhere between the archive and the machine. Guerrilha no Asfalto, by Edgar Pêra, has been named opening film of the festival's 24th edition, which runs from 15 to 25 October. It grows out of Manuel Ricardo Sousa's book of the same name and sets the account of a former FP-25 operative against the director's own memories of the 1980s, weaving together archive footage, fiction and…

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The ninth Festa do Livro em Belém runs 17 to 20 September with 70 exhibitors and 346 imprints. It opens with a tribute to António Lobo Antunes and closes with a GNR concert. Entry is free.

For four days a year the garden behind the pink presidential palace in Belém stops being the thing you glimpse over a wall. The Festa do Livro takes it over from 17 to 20 September, in its ninth edition, and it still costs nothing to walk in. The scale this year: 70 exhibitors, 346 imprints, 123 stalls and around 400 authors expected across the four days. It is run by the Presidency of the Republic with the Portuguese Publishers and Booksellers…

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Ronnie Wood is at the Coliseu dos Recreios on 14 September, doors at 8pm and music at 9pm. Tickets run from 45 to 195 euros.

Ronnie Wood is in Lisbon on Monday night. The Rolling Stones guitarist takes the stage at the Coliseu dos Recreios on 14 September at 9pm, with his own band and Imelda May as special guest. Doors open an hour earlier. The show is built around FEARLESS: THE ANTHOLOGY 1965-2025, the collection Wood released last year covering six decades of music, including four new tracks, among them You're So Fine. It is a career that could comfortably have been three:…

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The Californian band bring THE WOURLD TOUR to MEO Arena on 12 September. Nessa Barrett opens, the age rating is M/6, and the venue sits next to Oriente station.

The Neighbourhood play MEO Arena in Lisbon this Saturday, 12 September. Doors open at 18:30 and the show starts at 20:00, which in practice means anyone rolling up at eight has already missed the support. That support is Nessa Barrett, and it is worth the effort of turning up in time. The age rating is M/6 and the promoter is Everything Is New. The run is called THE WOURLD TOUR and it carries ((((((ultraSOUND)))))), the album released in November 2025.…

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What is on from 11 to 13 September: Caixa Alfama with more than 60 singers, the 73rd Festa de Alcoutim on the Guadiana, two nights in Porto's Palácio de Cristal gardens, Sigur Rós with an orchestra, and an Alentejo fair that shuts at three in the morning.

September is when the whole country seems to say goodbye to summer at once. Between Friday and Sunday there is fado coming out of ten different corners of Alfama, a 200-year-old pilgrimage in the Minho, three nights on the bank of the Guadiana and an orchestral Sunday in Porto. Six plans, and no two of them in the same region. Caixa Alfama returns on 11 and 12 September for its 14th edition, with more than 60 artists spread across ten stages — the Fado…

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The Feira das Cebolas runs 10–13 September at Portalegre's Parque de Feiras e Exposições, with around 230 exhibitors, an equestrian gala, livestock auctions, late-night concerts and free shuttle buses.

Some fairs exist to sell things. Others exist because the town would not know what to do with the weekend otherwise. Portalegre's Feira das Cebolas is the second kind, and it returns to the Parque de Feiras e Exposições on Thursday for four days. Gates open at 6pm on Thursday with the official inauguration and a brass band, Farra Fanfarra, working its way through the pavilions. Closing time is 3am. That is the schedule of a town that plans to eat out and…

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The Icelandic band brings The Orchestral Tour to Coliseu Porto Ageas on 13 September, joined on stage by the Sinfonietta de Lisboa and the Ricercare Choir.

Sigur Rós return to Porto this Sunday, 13 September, and they are bringing company. The show at Coliseu Porto Ageas puts the Sinfonietta de Lisboa and the Ricercare Choir on stage alongside the Icelandic trio. This is The Orchestral Tour, the run in which the band works with local musicians in each country rather than hauling an orchestra around the world. The set leans on ÁTTA, their 2023 album, with room for older material.

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Chronosphere runs from 18 to 20 September at the Parque de Lazer do Baião, with a reserved spot by the stage, a roaming support team and an area designed for deaf and hard-of-hearing crowds. Tickets from €45.

Almost no festival has an answer for the moment when the noise, the crowd and the lights stop being fun and start being too much. People who leave early because of it usually leave alone, and explain themselves to nobody. Chronosphere opens from 18 to 20 September at the Parque de Lazer do Baião in Góis, and it was built around that moment. The organisers bill it as Europe's first electronic music and arts festival designed from scratch with a fully…

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FAVA's seventh edition runs from 18 to 20 September at Loulé's municipal park, with a national solar-oven meeting, an organic produce market and a repair-and-reuse zone.

Some fairs are measured in stalls and some in plates. FAVA is the second kind: the organisers expect to serve around five thousand plant-based meals across three days. The seventh edition runs from 18 to 20 September at the Parque Municipal in Loulé, on a site redesigned this year to sit closer to the park's green areas. The programme runs past 100 free activities and performances. It is not only food. There are workshops, talks, live music and a…

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Palmela's grape harvest festival turns 63, the Avante turns 50 and Festival F closes on Saturday. Where to go from 4 to 6 September, with times, addresses and prices.

September has started properly. Between Friday and Sunday there is a grape harvest on the Sado, fifty years of the Avante, a festival closing in the Algarve and a pilgrimage counting down in the Douro. Six of them, running from a grape treading to a stadium show in Lisbon. The Festa das Vindimas is in its 63rd year and takes over the hilltop town from 3 to 8 September. Saturday brings the treading at the Lagariça in Largo de São João at 6pm and Phill…

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The Columbus Festival runs 17-20 September in Vila Baleira, with a period market, historical parades, street theatre and concerts. Madeira's tourism board has the dates confirmed.

One Portuguese island spends four days each September pretending it is still the 1400s, and most of the mainland never notices. The Columbus Festival runs from 17 to 20 September in Vila Baleira, on Porto Santo, and it is the kind of event where the whole town joins in rather than watching from behind a barrier. The Columbus connection is not invented for tourists. The navigator really did spend time on the island, tied to the archipelago through the…

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The tenth Estoril Classics runs 18 to 20 September at the Estoril circuit, with the Endurance Racing Legends grid back on the programme. Schedule, what to see on each day, and what you pay.

Most classic car events are a parade. This one is a race meeting: Formula 1 single-seaters from the 1970s and 1980s driven hard, on a circuit where a good number of them once competed for real. The tenth Estoril Classics runs from 18 to 20 September and the full timetable is now published. The addition this year is the return of Endurance Racing Legends, Peter Auto's grid of GTs and prototypes from the 1990s and 2000s. In practice that means a Maserati…

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The Festas em honra de Nossa Senhora da Nazaré run from 4 to 13 September and return to the Terreiro do Sítio, where they were last held in 1999. The 8th is a local public holiday.

Anyone who knows Nazaré will spot the change the moment they reach the Sítio. The Festas em honra de Nossa Senhora da Nazaré, running from 4 to 13 September, are moving back to the Terreiro do Sítio and the streets around it. The last time they were held there was 1999. Twenty-seven years ago. In recent years the festas had settled at the Parque Atlântico, a roomier site with a proper stage and space for the funfair. It worked well enough. But the…

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Portugal opens the run on 29 September. The set draws on the 1996 debut and Without You I'm Nothing, with songs the band has not played live in over twenty years. Tickets are 45 to 59 euros.

The odd and rather flattering detail here is that the tour starts in Lisbon. Not London, not Berlin. Placebo picked Sagres Campo Pequeno to open their 30th-anniversary run on 29 September, doors at seven, on stage at eight. The debut album came out in 1996, when Brian Molko and Stefan Olsdal were two very young men with fringes and an unusually fixed idea of what they wanted to sound like. Three decades on, the setlist reaches back to that record and to…

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Worten Mock Fest returns to Cinema São Jorge from 28 to 30 August, with stand-up, live podcasts and Portuguese guests. Every set runs 75 minutes and every room is 16-plus.

For three nights the Cinema São Jorge stops being a cinema. Worten Mock Fest takes over the Avenida da Liberdade venue from 28 to 30 August, in a second edition that puts international stand-up, live podcasts and Portuguese comics through the same building on the same three nights. Seven shows in total. Friday opens with Cubinho at 6pm and closes with the American Chris D'Elia at 10pm. Saturday brings Os Primos at 6pm and Tons de Comédia at 10pm. Sunday…

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Two of these finish on Sunday and one opens on Saturday. Where to go on 29 and 30 August, from Lagoa to the Palácio de Cristal, with prices, opening times and closing dates.

August ends on Sunday and takes three of these with it. A fourth opens on Saturday, a fifth runs on into September, and between them they stretch from the Algarve to Porto. FATACIL reaches the last of its ten days on Sunday. The Algarve's big fair puts one headline concert on every night and charges five euros at the gate, with doors at 6pm, which remains one of the better deals of the Portuguese summer. We covered the ten nights and the ten headliners…

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Festas do Mar runs 27 to 30 August across three stages, with five concerts a day and no ticket. David Fonseca headlines Friday, Matias Damásio Saturday, and Sunday closes with the sea procession and the Cascais Symphony.

Four nights left. Cascais opens the second and final weekend of Festas do Mar on Thursday, and it keeps the thing that sets it apart from almost everything else happening around Lisbon in August: every concert is free, across a site that stretches from the bay up through Jardim Visconde da Luz to the Cidadela. Things get going at 5pm. The main stage, Palco Cascais, runs to three fixed slots a night — 7pm, 8pm and 10pm. Thursday is the most traditional…

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The opening edition takes over Parque Urbano de Santiago on 18 and 19 September, with Mika and UB40 feat. Ali Campbell heading a bill of eight acts. Day tickets are €40 and the two-day pass is €65.

Viseu has a new festival in three weeks' time, and it is not content to just put up stages. It puts the region's wine on the same ticket. Rock & Dão runs its first edition on 18 and 19 September at Parque Urbano de Santiago, inside the city itself, which makes it one of the very few September bills you can walk to from your hotel. Eight acts have been announced for the main stage, four a night. Friday the 18th brings Os Pontos Negros, Cassete Pirata,…

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Lisbon's horror festival runs from 3 to 13 September across Cinema São Jorge and the Cinemateca, with nearly 150 screenings and a centenary tribute to Roger Corman.

Portugal's horror festival turns twenty this year, and it is marking the occasion by getting bigger than it has ever been. MOTELx runs from 3 to 13 September, eleven days carrying more than 170 films from 40 countries across close to 150 screenings. Cinema São Jorge on Avenida da Liberdade remains the festival's home. The Cinemateca Portuguesa takes a substantial share of the programme, and the rest spills out into Palácio do Grilo, Jardim das Amoreiras,…

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The biggest fair south of the Tejo runs in Lagoa until 30 August, with ten headline acts across ten nights. Gates open at 6pm, a day ticket is €5 and the full pass is €30.

Plenty of Algarve summer events ask for one evening and charge you like it was a weekend. FATACIL does the opposite: ten nights, ten headline acts, five euros on the gate. The fair's 45th edition opened on Friday in Lagoa and runs until 30 August. Tony Carreira played the opening night. Saturday belongs to Festa M80, the one night of the run that stays open until two in the morning. Sunday brings Hybrid Theory, the Linkin Park tribute that fills rooms…

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Extramuralhas is on until Saturday across five venues in Leiria. IAMX and The Chameleons play on Friday, everything at the Luís de Camões garden is free to walk into, and ticketed shows run from €10 to €30.

For three days Leiria becomes the goth capital of Portugal, and the striking thing is how much of it costs nothing. The fifteenth edition of Extramuralhas, run by the Fade In association, packs 23 shows into Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and 11 of them are free at the Luís de Camões garden in the middle of town. The rest are spread across the Teatro José Lúcio da Silva, the Teatro Miguel Franco, the intercultural centre in the former Misericórdia church,…

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