History A climbed from 94 to 109 points and descriptive geometry fell from 108 to 95. Some 85,745 papers were sat, 2,663 fewer than in 2025, and the no-show rate went from 6% to 9%.

Average marks in the second phase of Portugal's national secondary exams improved in 16 of the 24 papers sat, measured against 2025. The figures come from the Júri Nacional de Exames and were released by the education ministry late in the afternoon of 12 August. History A rose furthest, from 94 to 109 points on the 0-200 scale. Descriptive geometry fell furthest, from 108 to 95. What sits between those two ends is more interesting than either. Among the…

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15 August falls on a Saturday this year. Anyone working it at a company that stays open is owed either compensatory rest worth half the hours or a 50% pay uplift, and article 269 of the Labour Code hands the choice to the employer, not the worker.

The Feast of the Assumption, 15 August, is one of Portugal's mandatory public holidays, and this year it lands on a Saturday. For plenty of people that changes nothing at all. For anyone who works Saturdays it changes quite a lot, and what the law actually hands you is thinner than most people assume. Start with the misunderstanding that causes the most office arguments. A public holiday falling on a day you would not have worked anyway does not buy you a…

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The Assembleia da República's biographical register is free and voluntary to complete and is not a means of meeting any declaratory obligation, unlike the register of interests. The distinction explains why MPs' stated qualifications have been contested more than once.

If you want to know what a Portuguese MP studied, where they worked and what offices they have held, there is somewhere to look. The parliament's website publishes a biographical register for each of the 230 members: name, parentage, birthplace, profession, public, political and private posts, honours, publications. All of it open, no login required. What is not there is any assurance that it is accurate. Parliament says so itself, on the register's own…

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Assumption Day falls on a Saturday this year. The Romaria d'Agonia opens in Viana do Castelo, the Silves medieval fair shuts its gates, and two more festivals play their closing nights on Sunday. Here are the dates and the places.

Assumption Day lands on a Saturday in 2026, which is the version of a public holiday nobody wants: no bridge day, no extra Monday, just a Saturday with a nicer name. The country is having its festival season regardless. Six of them are running between Friday and Sunday, and four are in their final days. The Romaria de Nossa Senhora d'Agonia begins on Saturday itself and runs through to 23 August: nine days of processions, street bands, flower carpets laid…

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The man was detained on a domestic violence warrant, questioned by a judge and freed on condition of reporting to a police station every two weeks. The government says it is holding extra officers in Lisbon's tourist areas.

The man detained after the shooting that wounded a Swedish tourist on Rua Augusta, in central Lisbon, has been released. He appeared before a judge for a first questioning and was freed on condition that he reports to his local PSP station every two weeks. One detail explains the decision and got lost in most of this week's argument about it. The arrest was not made over the shooting. He was picked up on a warrant issued in a separate domestic violence…

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The EBU has approved three rule changes for the 2027 contest in Bulgaria: winners in conflict-affected regions can be barred from hosting, the minimum age for artists rises from 16 to 18, and the live-vocal rules have been spelled out.

Winning Eurovision has always come with a prize and a bill: the trophy, and the job of staging the whole thing twelve months later. The European Broadcasting Union has just made the second part conditional. Three rule changes were approved for the 2027 contest in Bulgaria. This is the one that matters. From 2027, a winning broadcaster is automatically ineligible to host the following contest where an armed conflict, a sensitive geopolitical situation or…

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Regulation (EU) 2026/1738 entered into force on 13 August. It requires 15% recycled plastic in new cars from 2032, extends the framework to lorries, buses and motorcycles, and from mid-2031 lets only roadworthy vehicles be exported out of the EU.

The regulation that decides how cars are designed, dismantled and recycled at the end of their lives came into force across the European Union today. It replaces two directives old enough to vote: one from 2000, the other from 2005. None of this will be visible in a showroom tomorrow. Almost every figure in the text is dated to the next decade, and that is where the story sits. From today, manufacturers have to publish clear instructions for removing and…

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Portaria 332/2026/1, published on 11 August, sets the rules for applications, places, assessment and external training. One new duty stands out: seven hours a month on emergency service from the second year onwards.

More than 550 pharmacists are currently working through Portugal's Residência Farmacêutica, the specialist training route that leads to the title of specialist pharmacist. Until this week they were doing it under a 2020 legal framework that never spelled out how any of it actually worked. Portaria 332/2026/1, published on 11 August, supplies the missing rulebook. The timing is the story. The first cohort is reaching the end of its training, with the first…

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Law 45/2026 was published on 11 August and creates three grades: assistant, adviser and senior adviser. It takes effect with the next state budget, and there are only around 150 dentists in the public sector today.

Until this week, a dentist working in a Portuguese health centre had no grade, no route to promotion and nothing to apply for. Most of them are freelancers invoicing month to month. Law 45/2026, published in the official gazette on 11 August, creates a dedicated dental career inside the national health service for the first time. Parliament passed it unanimously in July. The President signed it in early August.

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The entry bar doubles for newcomers, but existing partners are untouched by it. The change that actually bites them is a 10 million view floor on Shorts revenue, and Premium Lite is now rolling out to every country with Premium.

YouTube has changed its Partner Program for the first time since 2018, and the headline everyone reached for was the easy one: the bar to get in has doubled. That is accurate. It is also the part fewest people will feel. Read properly, the announcement YouTube published on 10 August contains three changes, and only one of them is about getting in. From 1 February 2027, a new channel applying to the programme needs 8,000 qualified watch hours over the…

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The official programme is out: horse racing on the 19th, a free D.A.M.A concert on the 20th, sung duels on the 22nd and, on 23 August as always, the rusgas night that made this Minho town's name.

Ponte da Barca does not get much sleep between 18 and 24 August. The Romaria de São Bartolomeu opens on the Tuesday and closes on the Monday night, and the official programme sets out what that means: seven themed days, nothing to pay, and one night the town measures its year by. That night is the 23rd. It always is. A rusga is a neighbourhood group that walks the streets playing and singing, and Ponte da Barca calls itself the capital of them. The claim…

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The civil ceremony took place on Tuesday 11 August, private and heavily guarded, with the couple's children present. Nine years after they met in Madrid, the announcement ran to three characters.

Cascais, in the end. After a month of dates that never firmed up and venues that were denied almost as fast as they were reported, Cristiano Ronaldo and Georgina Rodríguez were married on Tuesday 11 August in a private civil ceremony, their children present, security tight enough that nothing leaked until the couple wanted it to. There was no statement. There was a photograph of two hands, two bands, posted to Cristiano Ronaldo's Instagram account with a…

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The drop comes from one-off costs tied to the sale to Groupe BPCE and a higher effective tax rate. Lending grew 5.9%, deposits 7.7%, and the CET1 ratio climbed to 19.2%.

Novobanco closed the first half of the year with a profit of €367.2 million. The same six months last year produced €434.9 million, which makes for a 15.6% fall. The bank's explanation rests on two things, neither of them commercial. The first is the one-off cost of the sale to Groupe BPCE, the French deal that formally got moving this half and completed on 30 April. The second is a higher effective tax rate, with the tax bill up by close to 38%. Add…

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An average of 0.8 millimetres of rain fell across the mainland, under 8% of the normal figure for the month, and meteorological drought went from covering 60% of the country to all of it.

Mainland Portugal recorded an average of 0.8 millimetres of rain across the whole of July. That is under 8% of what the month normally delivers, according to IPMA's provisional figures. It makes July 2026 the driest July of this century, and the eighth driest since comparable records began in 1931. Outside Viana do Castelo and Braga, essentially nothing fell anywhere. The drought map moved accordingly. At the end of June, meteorological drought covered…

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Red flags went up at La Concha, Ondarreta and Zurriola as Portuguese man-o'-war colonies crowded the Basque coast, and the city council now reassesses conditions every two hours at most.

The Portuguese man-o'-war is not a jellyfish. It is a floating colony trailing a tentacle that can run for metres, and this month enough of them reached the Gipuzkoa coast for lifeguards to raise the red flag in the middle of the swimming season. The peak came on 4 August. San Sebastián's beaches logged roughly 120 sting cases needing assistance in a single day, the overwhelming majority of them minor, according to the city council. Earlier in the week…

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The chain is putting over €45 million into the country by summer 2027. The first opening is 2 September at Forum Castelo Branco, the second 10 September at Alegro Setúbal.

Four new stores, an extension to an existing one and around 300 jobs by summer 2027. That is what Primark has under way in Portugal, backed by an investment of more than €45 million. The first two openings already have dates. Forum Castelo Branco gets the city's first Primark on 2 September. Eight days later, on 10 September, Alegro Setúbal follows. Next come GaiaShopping in Vila Nova de Gaia and central Porto, and the Porto one is worth flagging…

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The text filed with the Assembly of the Republic asks for licences to expire automatically at 75. Today the law works the other way round, through renewal deadlines and individual fitness assessments.

The question has been going round neighbourhood groups and comment threads since the start of the month, and the legal answer catches most people out. Portugal has no maximum age for driving a car. What it now has is a petition asking for one. Filed with the Assembly of the Republic and created on 1 April, it proposes that a driving licence should expire automatically at 75. The petitioner, Nélson Manuel de Oliveira Ferreira, argues that cognitive, visual…

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Portugal's governing party runs its 22nd summer university from 24 to 30 August, with Paulo Portas taking the Saturday morning slot and Luís Montenegro closing the week.

Every August since 2003, a hill town of barely three thousand people in the Alto Alentejo hosts a sizeable chunk of the Portuguese centre-right for a week. Castelo de Vide does it again from 24 to 30 August, for the 22nd edition of the PSD's summer university. The format has not changed much. Around a hundred selected young people from across the country get a week of classes, dinner-conferences, workshops and a mock parliamentary session. It is run…

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Portugal's infrastructure minister says the Chelas–Barreiro rail-and-road bridge and the Algés–Trafaria tunnel will both be finished inside a decade, cutting ten minutes off the Lisbon–Barreiro run and thirty off Lisbon–Setúbal.

At the 25 de Abril bridge's 60th birthday, Portugal's infrastructure and housing minister chose to talk about what does not exist yet. Miguel Pinto Luz said the Tagus will gain two new crossings within ten years: a bridge from Chelas to Barreiro, and a tunnel between Algés and Trafaria. His framing was arithmetic, and it explains why the promise sounds large. Major Tagus crossings have historically arrived roughly every thirty years, the 25 de Abril six…

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The 2026 Nossa Senhora dos Remédios festival runs from 27 August to 9 September, with Plutónio, Sara Correia and Os Quatro e Meia on the bill alongside the Marcha Luminosa and the Procissão do Triunfo.

Most Portuguese town festivals last a weekend. Lamego's runs for a fortnight. The festival in honour of Nossa Senhora dos Remédios takes over the city from 27 August to 9 September, and the council has now published the full programme. The music starts at full volume, with Xutos & Pontapés — Portugal's most durable rock band — playing on opening night, 27 August. Plutónio, fado singer Sara Correia and, on 4 September, Os Quatro e Meia follow.

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Camp Rock 3 premieres 13 August on Disney Channel and 14 August on Disney+. Joe, Nick and Kevin Jonas return as Connect 3, while Demi Lovato stays off screen as an executive producer.

Sixteen years after the second film, camp reopens. Camp Rock 3 premieres on Disney Channel this Thursday, 13 August, and arrives on Disney+ the following day. The setup does its job: Connect 3 lose the opening act for a major reunion tour and head back to Camp Rock to find a replacement. The campers compete for the slot, and it turns into unlikely alliances, revelations and romances — the old machinery, with a new intake.

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Norges Bank Investment Management takes 92% of a portfolio valued at around €1.5bn. Sonae Sierra puts in 8% and takes on asset management of the 258,000 square metres.

The world's largest sovereign wealth fund is adding eight Spanish shopping centres to its books, and the company running them day to day will be Portuguese. Norges Bank Investment Management, which manages Norway's oil fund, signed the agreement on 31 July to acquire a 92% interest and will pay around €1.4bn for it. The portfolio's gross value is roughly €1.5bn. A Sonae Sierra subsidiary takes the remaining 8% and will perform asset management on behalf…

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The magnitude 7.4 quake struck San José del Palmar in Chocó at a depth of about 103km. Five departmental capitals are on red alert and seven airports have suspended operations.

At least 132 people were killed and 570 injured by the earthquake that hit western Colombia on Monday morning. The toll is provisional and rescue teams are still working through rubble in several cities. The epicentre was San José del Palmar, in the department of Chocó, roughly 400km west of Bogotá. The Colombian Geological Service put the magnitude at 7.4 and the depth at about 103km, while the USGS record for the event puts it at 110km. Either way it is…

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Syria's Fourth Criminal Court convicted the ousted president of premeditated murder and torture. He was tried in absentia and remains in Russia, so the sentence cannot be carried out.

A court in Damascus sentenced Bashar al-Assad to death on Tuesday, convicting him in absentia of premeditated murder, torture and crimes against humanity. It is the first capital sentence handed down against the ousted president or anyone in his inner circle since the regime collapsed in December 2024. Assad was not there to hear it. He has lived in Russia since fleeing, and unless Moscow returns him the sentence stays on paper. His brother Maher al-Assad…

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The third qualifying round second leg kicks off at 7.45pm on Thursday in Edinburgh. Whoever comes through faces a two-legged play-off on 20 and 27 August for a place in the league phase.

Six-one from the first leg makes Thursday a formality, but it is a formality that still has to be played. Benfica are at Tynecastle Park in Edinburgh on Thursday, kick-off 7.45pm — the same clock time in Lisbon and in Scotland. The tie was effectively settled at the Estádio da Luz on 6 August, when Benfica put six past Hearts. Getting there was messier: they lost 2-1 away to St Gallen in the previous round before winning the return 5-0.

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Samsung unveiled zHBM at the FMS 2026 conference, claiming four times HBM4's transfer speed at a quarter of the power. SK hynix and Sandisk used the same stage to publish the first open High-Bandwidth Flash spec.

The thing slowing AI down right now is not the processor. It is the distance data travels between the processor and its memory, and that distance exists because in current designs the memory sits next to the chip rather than on top of it. Samsung's answer, shown on 4 August at the Future of Memory and Storage conference in Santa Clara, is called zHBM: stack the high-bandwidth memory vertically, directly above the AI accelerator. The company says zHBM…

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Lanterns runs eight episodes from Monday 17 August, with Aaron Pierre, Kyle Chandler, Kelly Macdonald and Laura Linney, and a premise that swaps intergalactic spectacle for a case to solve.

There is an odd decision at the heart of Lanterns, and it is the reason to give the thing a chance. DC Studios took the Green Lantern Corps — an intergalactic police force whose rings can conjure anything the wearer can imagine — and shot a slow-burning investigation drama in the American middle of nowhere. Season one runs eight episodes and premieres on Monday 17 August on HBO Max. The trailer announcement came from the HBO Max Portugal press room, which…

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Turnover rose 6.5% year on year, driven by the domestic market (up 9.0%) and energy (up 11.6%). In the same month industrial employment fell 0.7% while wages paid rose 5.6%.

Portuguese factories took more money in June. The industry turnover index rose 6.5% on the same month last year, according to the series INE publishes for industrial business indices, and across the whole second quarter sales were up 7.5%, against a mere 1.4% in the previous quarter. The small print matters here. A good chunk of that rise is price rather than volume — the statistics office itself attributes the quarterly acceleration largely to prices.…

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The prime minister said Portugal is more competitive than its partners, while conceding the difficulties faced by anyone relying on the health service, raising school-age children or filling a fuel tank.

Luís Montenegro spent Monday morning in Fafe, in the Braga district, formally opening the town's new Loja do Cidadão. The one-stop public services centre had already been serving the public since 3 August, in the old Royal Center building, gathering government departments and partner bodies behind a single set of counters. The visit was listed on the prime minister's official agenda for the day.

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The urban lease reform approved in cabinet cuts the arrears threshold from three months to two, gives landlords six months to act, frees the starting rent on new contracts and rewrites the rules for pre-1990 leases.

As the law stands, a tenant in Portugal has to fall three months behind on rent before the landlord can terminate the lease. Under the reform approved in cabinet, two will be enough. That is the bluntest change in a package the government presents as a way of coaxing empty flats back onto the rental market, and which it announced as a reform to increase housing supply. None of it is in force. This is a draft law: parliament has to debate and vote it, the…

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Today is the race's only rest day, spent in Santa Maria da Feira. Alexis Guerin reaches it 1:12 clear of team-mate Artem Nych, with Tiago Antunes third at 1:52.

The Volta a Portugal stops today. It is the only rest day of this edition and it happens in Santa Maria da Feira, at the Europarque, where the teams will do massages, arithmetic and a short spin to keep the legs honest. Tomorrow the break ends in the least forgiving way available: 129 kilometres from Santa Maria da Feira to Peso da Régua, the race's first proper argument with the Douro. The route is set out in the stage-by-stage guide published by the…

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That is about US$14.5 billion for a single month, 5.6% more than June, with January to July running 37.0% ahead of last year. High-performance computing, where AI chips sit, was 66% of second-quarter revenue.

If you want to know whether the money pouring into artificial intelligence is still pouring, the most useful company to watch is not Nvidia or OpenAI. It is the Taiwanese contract manufacturer that makes almost everybody else's chips. TSMC reported July revenue of NT$467.58 billion, roughly US$14.5 billion, in the monthly figures it publishes on its investor relations monthly revenue page. That is a record month: up 44.7% on July 2025 and 5.6% on June.…

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A running tracker of AIMA — case backlog, renewal deadlines, biometrics, golden visa and service changes. Updated whenever there is news.

If you are dealing with residence or nationality, this is the page to bookmark. Instead of one article per announcement, we gather the essentials of AIMA here: case backlog, renewal deadlines, biometrics, golden visa and service changes. For the citizenship rules, see the new nationality law. Official information is at AIMA. The renewals portal now accepts applications for permits expiring in November and December 2026, an extension opened on 3 August.…

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Calls PESSOAS-2026-10 and PESSOAS-2026-11 fund youth Education and Training Courses for 2026/2027. Applications close on 31 August and 16 September, through the Portugal 2030 portal.

There is €17.5 million on the table for youth Education and Training Courses in the 2026/2027 school year, €15 million of it from the European Social Fund Plus. The calls opened on 7 August, and there is not one of them. There are two, with different eligible applicants and different deadlines, and mixing them up costs an application. Call PESSOAS-2026-10 is for public education establishments running CEF courses at level 2 of the National Qualifications…

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Law 44/2026, published on Monday, sets out the rights of students with specific educational needs in higher education, brings back expert-committee assessment for applicants without a multi-purpose disability certificate, and amends the 2006 accessibility rules.

Apply to a Portuguese university with a disability this year and you need a multi-purpose medical incapacity certificate to prove it. Applicants who could not get the document in time were shut out of the priority quota, even where the disability was documented some other way. The law published on Monday undoes that. Law 44/2026 appeared in the official gazette on 10 August, approving the legal framework for students with specific educational needs in…

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Law 43/2026, published in the official gazette on Monday, sets up transition homes for up to ten residents and home-support options for patients who are medically discharged but have nowhere to go. It only takes financial effect with the 2027 state budget.

Some hospital beds in Portugal are occupied by people who are no longer ill. Their discharge was signed weeks ago, sometimes far longer, and they stay put because there is no adapted housing, no family able to take them, and no place anywhere else. The term for it is social admission, and as of Monday it has a law attached to its name. The legal framework for the Voltar a Casa programme was published in the official gazette on 10 August as Law 43/2026. It…

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Faro hit €22.5 per square metre in July, edging past Lisbon district on €21.4 for the first time in the series. Nationally, rents rose 0.9%, ending six straight months of falls.

For years this question had one automatic answer. In July it stopped having one. Faro district now carries the highest median rent in the country at €22.5 per square metre, ahead of Lisbon district on €21.4. It is the first time that has happened in the series. The figures come from idealista's July rental price index, and they arrive with a second number that reframes the picture. Rents across Portugal rose 0.9% against July last year, to a national…

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The UAE Emirates Dane covered 17.4 kilometres in 21 minutes 13 seconds. Tiago Antunes was second on the stage and moved up to third overall, 1m52s behind Alexis Guerin.

Julius Johansen won stage five of the Volta a Portugal on Monday, the individual time trial from Anadia to Águeda. The UAE Emirates rider covered the 17.4 kilometres in 21 minutes 13 seconds, averaging 49.1 kilometres per hour. Portugal's Tiago Antunes, riding for Efapel Cycling, took second, with Dutchman Axel van der Tuuk of Euskaltel Euskadi third. Alexis Guerin of Anicolor/Campicarn finished the stage eighth, 53 seconds down on the winner, and kept…

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The official Wednesday programme has been pulled out of Rio de Onor and Guadramil and rehoused at Bragança Municipal Aerodrome, where the Sun will be 99% covered.

If your Wednesday plan involved Rio de Onor, redraw it. Bragança town council has pulled every official eclipse viewing activity out of the villages of Rio de Onor and Guadramil, inside the Montesinho Natural Park, and moved them to Bragança Municipal Aerodrome. The reason is not astronomical. It is fire. Authorities restricted access to the park's forested areas given the danger rating, a decision weighted by the Deilão rural fire that broke out on 27…

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Kauê Matos, 19, was stopped at Lisbon airport without a valid residence permit and flown to Brazil. His family reunification file had been sitting undecided at AIMA since 2024.

Kauê Matos is 19. He had been living in Portugal for about two years with his parents and brother, and he was on his way back from a school placement in Ireland when border officers at Lisbon's Humberto Delgado airport stopped him. He had no valid residence permit, because the family reunification application his family filed with AIMA was still, two years later, undecided. Days later he was on a flight to Brazil. On Friday the case turned. The Lisbon…

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Automatic extensions are gone and renewals are now entirely online, released in monthly waves. The window for permits expiring in November and December 2026 is already open.

For years, anyone holding a Portuguese residence permit about to run out had an informal safety net. Automatic extensions were rolled over by decree whenever AIMA's queue grew too long. That net has been taken away. Since late 2025 there is no general extension, and a card that expires now genuinely expires. What replaced it is a fully digital process at portal-renovacoes.aima.gov.pt, released in monthly waves so that half a million people are not…

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UDIPSS Braga has written to the President and the Government about €11.9 million of social investment, €6.1 million of it from the recovery plan, at risk because deadlines expire before the works finish.

The question sounds absurd until you look at the paperwork. There are building sites in Braga that are 95% complete and may lose the European money that has paid for them so far, because the spending deadline runs out before the builders do. UDIPSS Braga, the district union of private social solidarity institutions, has sent an open letter to the President, the Prime Minister and several government ministers asking for an urgent political answer. Its…

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