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.

By Marta Carneiro

Photo: GualdimG / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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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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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