The government approved 421 million euros for new Porto Metro lines to Gondomar and Trofa. On the Trofa line only two of nine stations are metro; the other seven are served by electric metrobus, with a change at Muro.

Portugal's Council of Ministers approved 421 million euros on Thursday for two new Porto Metro lines, one to Gondomar and one to Trofa. The government's statement does not draw the distinction. On the Trofa line, though, the metro only reaches the second station: from Muro onwards, you continue by electric bus. The Gondomar line is the conventional one. It runs for about seven kilometres and nine stations from Estádio do Dragão to Souto, in central…

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Maria João Carneiro, a volunteer with the Resende fire brigade, was struck by a falling tree while fighting a blaze in Barrô and died hours later at Lamego Hospital. She is the second firefighter to die on duty in Portugal this year.

Maria João Carneiro, a 24-year-old volunteer firefighter, died in the early hours of Friday after being struck by a falling tree while fighting a fire in Barrô, in the municipality of Resende, in Portugal's Viseu district. She was pulled out alive and taken to Lamego Hospital, where she died hours later. She served with the Resende volunteer fire brigade. The fire, in scrubland, broke out at 8:36pm on Thursday and has its own entry on Portugal's fogos.pt…

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We added up the daily records the SNS has published since 2016. Between 1 and 18 September there were 1,028 flu consultations in primary care, 12% more than last year and the highest in the series. Flu season itself does not usually start until November.

Portugal's health centres recorded 1,028 flu consultations between 1 and 18 September. That is the highest figure for that window in ten Septembers of daily records: 918 last year, 727 in 2024, 700 in 2023, and just 519 in 2019, the last autumn before the pandemic. Very nearly double. Nobody has published this number because nobody worked it out. The data has been open for years, updated most days, sitting there waiting for someone to add it up. We went…

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Three ignitions merged into one front on Saturday across Vila Nova de Poiares, Arganil and Góis, drawing 806 personnel, 260 vehicles and 15 aircraft. Three firefighters were lightly injured. The maximum DECIR phase ends on 30 September.

The fire that on Saturday joined Vila Nova de Poiares, Arganil and Góis into a single front has been in resolution since 00:45 on Sunday. More than 300 personnel stayed on the ground waiting for flare-ups, which is always the quiet part of these nights. It began as three ignitions. Two broke out very close together at Sabouga, in the parish of Lavegadas in Vila Nova de Poiares, reported at 13:40; the third had been logged five minutes earlier at…

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Vila Viçosa's national heritage file opened in August 2018 and was renamed this week. The council wants Monumento Nacional status signed off by December — a year and a half before the World Heritage Committee next meets.

Vila Viçosa is running two heritage bids at once, and only one of them answers to Paris. The two get blurred together constantly, which is a shame, because their timelines could hardly be further apart. The first is domestic. It has been open since August 2018, and this week it changed its name. Anúncio n.º 248/2026, published in the official gazette on 16 September, amends the original opening of the procedure, redraws the provisional protection zone…

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The European Commission proposed €489 million from the EU Solidarity Fund on 17 September for the January and February storms. Portugal's share is €261 million, of which €65.37 million was already advanced in July. The rest waits on a vote in Parliament and Council.

On 17 September the European Commission proposed mobilising €489 million from the EU Solidarity Fund for the storms that swept southern Europe at the start of the year. Portugal's slice is €261 million. Spain, Italy and Malta share the remaining €227 million between them. The gap reflects what happened here. Between 22 January and 15 February, Portugal took a run of unusually intense storms, with high winds, heavy seas, concentrated rainfall, flooding and…

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The Furnas classification ran for eight days and lapsed. We went back to the CIVISA page and counted again: Santa Bárbara and the west Terceira fissural system, both at V1 since July, and Manadas on São Jorge, at V1 since March 2024.

Furnas is back at V0. The classification CIVISA gave the São Miguel volcano on 8 September ran for eight days, was not renewed, and the system has returned to the resting state it occupies almost all of the time. The announcement itself is not the interesting part, and the regional press has already carried it. The count is. When Furnas went up, we counted the entries on the CIVISA alerts page and found four Azorean volcanic systems sitting at V1…

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IPMA's August bulletin is out and it closes a question left open ten days ago. Mean temperature came in 0.16C above normal, the average daily high came in below normal, and more than two and a half times the usual rain fell.

Ten days ago we were left holding a question. Copernicus had just handed western Europe its hottest summer on record, 2.54C above the 1991-2020 average, and Portugal — which sits inside the geographic box that produced that record — appeared nowhere on any of the lists. The national bulletin that would explain the absence did not exist yet. It does now. The answer is almost anticlimactic. Mainland Portugal's mean August air temperature was 23.07C, an…

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Portugal's interior minister said on Friday that the Government is preparing a legislative change creating a dedicated fraud offence, prosecutable without a complaint, for selling substances passed off as narcotics.

Anyone who has walked through Lisbon's Baixa in the early evening knows the approach. Someone falls into step, offers hashish under their breath, and what is actually in their hand, almost every time, is pressed bay leaf — culinary laurel compacted into a block and sold to visitors at the price of a drug it is not. That is not currently a crime. At most it is an administrative offence for unlicensed street trading, which is why officers can identify a…

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The 2026-2027 seasonal campaign opens on 30 September at SNS units, participating pharmacies and other vaccination points. Free flu vaccination now covers children aged two to four, and the Covid-19 recommendation moves from 60 to 70.

There is a date at last. Portugal's autumn-winter vaccination campaign opens on 30 September at National Health Service units, participating community pharmacies and other vaccination points. The norms setting out who is entitled to what came out this week, after a stretch in which the date simply did not exist and the calendar was being guessed from last year's.

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The petition to scrap the Volta deposit-return scheme reached parliament on 15 August with 34,211 signatures, against a legal minimum of 7,500 for a plenary debate. A month on it stands at 37,134 and is still waiting to be ruled admissible.

The petition calling for an end to Portugal's Volta scheme has 37,134 signatures. That is the figure that went round the press this week, and it is a big one. It is also not the figure that decides anything. For a petition to be considered in plenary, Portugal's right-of-petition law sets a minimum of 7,500 subscribers. When this one arrived at the Assembleia da República on 15 August it already carried 34,211 — four and a half times what it needed. The…

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Botond Roska and José-Alain Sahel have won the 2026 António Champalimaud Vision Award, worth one million euros. It recognises two decades of work on optogenetic therapies, which make surviving retinal cells respond to light after the eye's photoreceptors are gone.

There is a one-million-euro science prize that leaves Lisbon every year and is the largest in its field anywhere in the world. It is the António Champalimaud Vision Award, given by the Champalimaud Foundation, and the 2026 edition now has its winners: Botond Roska and José-Alain Sahel. Roska is a neuroscientist and a founding director of the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology in Basel. Sahel is an ophthalmologist and clinician-scientist at…

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The investigation into the 10 August shooting that hit a 42-year-old Swedish visitor has changed hands and changed charge. The three men sought by Portugal's judicial police presented themselves on Tuesday and were being questioned that night on suspicion of attempted homicide.

The three men wanted by Portugal's Polícia Judiciária over the Rua Augusta shooting presented themselves to the authorities on Tuesday. By late evening they were being questioned. The offence named is attempted homicide. Investigators had identified them during the day. A morning search operation failed to find them, and the judicial police obtained an undertaking from their defence lawyers that all three would come in before the day was out. They did.…

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Iran, Iraq and five Gulf states were due to meet on Monday to draw shipping corridors through the strait. It was called off the night before, with no new date, after Riyadh filed amendments to a proposal Tehran and Muscat had already settled.

The meeting that was meant to draw shipping lanes through the Strait of Hormuz never opened. It was set for Monday in Salalah, the port city on Oman's southern coast, and it was called off on Sunday night with no new date attached. The host said so itself. Oman's foreign ministry announced the postponement of the Salalah regional meeting, citing the need to build the right conditions for constructive dialogue, and foreign minister Badr Albusaidi framed…

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Portugal's 2025 National Health Survey puts blood-pressure checks at 80.2% among people with no formal education, the highest of any education level. On colonoscopies the same group drops to 37.3%, against 55.9% for graduates.

Statistics Portugal released another slice of the 2025 National Health Survey on Tuesday, this one on access to healthcare. The figure in its title is that 51.4% of people aged 50 and over said they had had a colonoscopy in the previous ten years. Just over half. The headline average is not the interesting part. What the full table shows is how that average splits by education, and that it splits the opposite way to everything around it.

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Portugal's health directorate expects poor air quality on 14 and 15 September across Lisbon and the Tagus Valley, the Alentejo and the Algarve, with PM10 climbing. Then the heat breaks, and on the coast Tuesday's high falls by as much as nine degrees.

An air mass off the North African deserts is crossing mainland Portugal on Monday and Tuesday, carrying suspended dust with it. Portugal's health directorate has issued the notice it puts out for these episodes, and this one is aimed at the southern half of the country: Lisbon and the Tagus Valley, the Alentejo and the Algarve above all. What rises is PM10, the inhalable particles that occur naturally rather than coming out of an exhaust or a chimney.…

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Houthi forces reached Perim on Friday, the island that splits the entrance to the Red Sea into two shipping lanes. At the other end of the route, the International Maritime Organization counts 21 ships attacked and ten seafarers killed since February.

From a kitchen table in Portugal the Red Sea can feel like somebody else's problem. It is not. A large share of what reaches Europe from Asia comes through it, and on Friday the corridor narrowed again. Houthi fighters reached Perim, the uninhabited island that divides the Bab el-Mandeb into two shipping lanes, after Yemeni government troops pulled back. The day before, they had taken the port of Mokha further up the same coast. Hold Perim and you…

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The figures come from a self-regulation protocol signed on Friday by the city council, the taxi associations, airport operator ANA and Lisbon's tourism association. They are not municipal tariffs, signing up is voluntary, and consumer group DECO has already questioned whether the arrangement is lawful.

If you land at Lisbon and walk to the taxi rank at Humberto Delgado, from 15 October you will know the price before you get in. A ride into the city costs 16 euros in the inner zone and 19 euros in the outer one, on weekdays during the day. At night, at weekends and on public holidays those become 20 and 23 euros. The protocol was signed on Friday by Lisbon city council, the Portuguese Taxi Federation and ANTRAL, with airport operator ANA and the Lisbon…

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The study presented in Guarda names the Azores, Beja, Bragança, Castelo Branco, Évora, Faro, Guarda, Madeira, Portalegre, Vila Real and Viseu. The proposals run from income tax deductions and property tax relief to extra holiday.

Portugal's medical council went to Guarda to present a study and came back with a closed list. Eleven territories are hard to staff with doctors: the Azores, Beja, Bragança, Castelo Branco, Évora, Faro, Guarda, Madeira, Portalegre, Vila Real and Viseu. The complaint attached to the list is about method. The work, coordinated by council president Carlos Cortes with doctors from several specialities, argues that the response so far has come in scattered,…

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The GNR's Safe School programme covers more than 4,400 schools and around 670,000 pupils, and the PSP has been out since 7 September. Simple assault was the most common offence, with 950 cases.

The GNR launched its Safe School programme for 2026/2027 today, an operation covering more than 4,400 schools and roughly 670,000 pupils across the territory the force polices. The PSP did not wait for today, stepping up its presence around schools and on home-to-school routes from 7 September. The figure that puts the rest in context sits in the same statement. Over the last school year, the GNR recorded 2,631 crimes in school settings.

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ANA has put a 2027 tariff proposal to the airlines: 0.67% more in Lisbon, worth roughly ten cents a passenger, against average rises of 3.77% in Porto and 3.79% in Faro. The regulator still has to approve it.

The regulated charges paid to use Lisbon, Porto and Faro airports are set to rise from 1 January 2027. The proposal comes from ANA, has been put to the airlines, and still has to clear the national civil aviation authority, ANAC, before it means anything. What makes it worth reading is the gap between the three. In Lisbon, once the concession contract's estimate-correction mechanisms are applied, the proposed increase is 0.67% on 2026, roughly ten cents…

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Copernicus closed the books on August: western Europe beat its 2003 record by more than half a degree. Portugal sits inside the box that produced the record, yet appears in none of the bulletin's lists of countries that set one.

Summer 2026 was the warmest ever measured in western Europe. The June-to-August average across the region came in at 21.69C, which is 2.54C above the 1991-2020 norm, and the Copernicus bulletin published on Thursday shows by how much it won: the previous record, from 2003, stood at 1.98C above average. It fell by more than half a degree. That comparison is what changes the meaning of the number. In 2003 the European summer was a freak, a spike surrounded…

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CIVISA raised the Furnas volcano on São Miguel to V1 after a day of low-magnitude tremors and one magnitude 2.9 quake felt in the village. V1 is the second of eight rungs, and three other Azorean systems have been on it for months.

The Azores seismic and volcanic monitoring centre raised the alert level on the Furnas volcano to V1 on Tuesday, after a day of unusual activity under the municipality of Povoação on São Miguel. The tremors began at 11.47am local time. Almost all of them were too small to notice. One was not: a magnitude 2.9 quake at 4.41pm, with its epicentre roughly four kilometres west-southwest of Furnas, felt at a maximum intensity of V on the Modified Mercalli scale…

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The winter immunisation rule for babies was signed on 2 September and starts the programme on 16 September. A year ago today, the flu and covid-19 rules were already published. On Wednesday the DGS list still had neither.

Part of the winter campaign already has a date. Portugal's Directorate-General of Health signed the rule for seasonal respiratory syncytial virus immunisation in children on 2 September, and it opens the programme on 16 September, running through to 31 March 2027. A catch-up window runs from 16 September to 30 October for babies missed at birth. The strategy went universal this year: every healthy child born from 1 April 2026 onwards is eligible, since…

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73 million people rode the metro between April and June, down 1% on the year and the second falling quarter in a row. Rail was up 6.2%, airports 1.5% and river transport 0.4%. The gap between metro and rail is closing fast.

Between April and June nearly everyone travelled more. Trains carried 62.9 million passengers, up 6.2% on the year. National airports handled 20.8 million, up 1.5%. Even river transport, which had fallen 3.2% at the start of the year, came back to 6.2 million passengers and a 0.4% rise. The metro was the exception. It carried 73.0 million people in the second quarter, a fall of 1.0% against the same period of 2025, according to the transport statistics…

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Portugal scored 462 in reading and 460 in maths, down 15 and 12 points since 2022, with science on 482. That is roughly where the country stood in 2006.

The PISA 2025 results landed on Tuesday, and Portugal's numbers are grim in all three subjects at once. Fifteen-year-olds here scored 460 in maths, 462 in reading and 482 in science. Those are close to what the country was recording in 2006, before two decades of steady gains that have now been handed back. Set against 2022, the fall is 15 points in reading and 12 in maths. Science held up better, slipping three.

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The DGADR contract, funded by Portugal's recovery plan, runs for 14 months across the Bravura reservoir, the Monte Velho tunnel and the main conveyance line. A second phase of around €40m has been announced but not dated.

The system that waters Alvor was built for a different century. It grew up around the Bravura dam, finished in 1958, to serve roughly 1,800 hectares, and it moves water along an open canal where evaporation and seepage take their cut over the whole route. The work now under way changes that. Phase one of the Alvor irrigation modernisation is worth €11,199,674.06 and has a 14-month deadline, paid for through the strand of Portugal's recovery and resilience…

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WWF Portugal and MARDIVE have staked nine salvaged trolleys across three spots in Trafaria bay, Almada, after divers found seahorses already clinging to abandoned ones. Monitoring runs to 2028.

Nine supermarket trolleys are sitting on the bed of Trafaria bay, in Almada, and nobody is going to haul them out. They were put there deliberately, pinned to the sediment across three separate spots. They are shelters. The idea did not come out of a meeting. It came from underwater, when divers from MARDIVE, the association doing the science behind WWF Portugal's D-EVOLUÇÃO work in the Tagus estuary, went to look at what was left of the seabed off the…

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The Tavira court ordered Miner Blanc's Cerro do Meio quarry closed for breaching the personality rights of residents in Luz de Tavira and Santo Estêvão. The complaints were noise, vibration and dust.

The Tavira court has ordered the Cerro do Meio quarry closed, immediately and permanently. The company has until the day after the ruling to stop work, and from then on it pays €2,000 for every day the digging continues. Ignore the order and there is a possible charge of disobedience on top. The quarry belongs to Miner Blanc, part of the Verdasca group, and sits in the parish union of Luz de Tavira and Santo Estêvão. It was the residents who took the case…

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The airline has 80% of this year's fuel bought forward at $67 a barrel and pays market price for the rest — and it has cut its annual passenger target by two million. In Portugal, the Azores lose every Ryanair flight from March.

If you are eyeing tickets for November or January, book earlier than usual. Ryanair warned this week that it expects to cut flights over the winter, and the reason is more precise than it sounds: about 80% of this year's fuel is bought forward at $67 a barrel, but the remaining 20% is paid at market price, with jet fuel trading near $140. Winter is, in the airline's own words, an unprofitable season. Fewer seats on sale usually means dearer fares for the…

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