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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Porto's book fair opens Friday in the Palácio de Cristal gardens, Os Quatro e Meia play Viseu on Saturday and Amarante's performing arts biennial runs to the 30th. Then an unusually autumnal low is forecast to reach the mainland on Sunday.

There is a scheduling problem this weekend. All three of the things genuinely worth travelling for happen outdoors, and the forecast has saved something for Sunday. Porto first. The book fair returns to the Palácio de Cristal gardens on Friday the 21st and stays up until 6 September, with 144 stands and more than two hundred free events across talks, concerts, film and family sessions. This year's edition is built around poetry and honours the poet Inês…

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The musical runs at the Capitolio until 4 October, directed by Pedro Pernas and produced by the Lisbon Film Orchestra. It tells the week 38 planes landed in a small Newfoundland town with American airspace closed. Tickets are 25 to 35 euros.

The arithmetic is the first thing that gets you. Twelve performers on stage, 41 characters in the script. Almost everybody who walks on will be somebody else ten minutes later, and that is what makes Come From Away an odd object inside the musical genre: it has no lead. It has a town. The town is Gander, in Newfoundland. In the week after 11 September 2001, with United States airspace shut, 38 aircraft were diverted to its airport carrying roughly seven…

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BapAmarante returns from 21 to 30 August with dance, theatre, film, literature and concerts staged in a municipal market, a country estate, museum cloisters and a church forecourt. There is no box office.

For the next ten days Amarante hands its everyday spaces over to contemporary performance. The second edition of BapAmarante, the town's performing arts biennial, opens on Friday 21 August and closes on the 30th. The full programme carries ten pieces, all of them free, under the banner of reinventing what is held in common. It starts at 22:00 on Friday inside the municipal market, with Cláudia Dias's "segunda-feira: atenção à direita!", part of her Sete…

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The last five days of Portugal's biggest romaria run from 19 to 23 August, with the Mordomia parade, flower carpets laid overnight in the Ribeira, and fireworks on four consecutive nights — the last of them over the river Lima.

The romaria opened on 15 August and has been saving itself. Almost everything people cross the country for is packed into the five days that are left, including fireworks on four consecutive nights, each one at midnight, each one somewhere different. Reveille at 8.30am in Praça da República, giants and big-heads parading at noon, and at 4pm the Desfile da Mordomia — the images that travel the world, with the mordomas in full costume and the family gold…

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From 4 to 6 September, Ana Moura, GNR, Slow J and Bárbara Tinoco play the Praça Municipal and Avenida Central, museums stay open late, and entry to the whole thing is free.

Braga's Noite Branca is back from 4 to 6 September, three days of programming with free entry from start to finish. This year's line is "Em Braga, a noite tem outro ritmo" — in Braga, the night keeps a different rhythm — and it arrives with a redesigned visual identity. Nine acts are confirmed so far: Ana Moura, Tiago Bettencourt, GNR, Fernando Daniel, Papillon, Slow J, Mizzy Miles, Anselmo Ralph and Bárbara Tinoco, who closes the event. The main concerts…

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The 13th Feira do Livro do Porto takes over the Palácio de Cristal gardens from 21 August to 6 September: 144 stands, 200-plus events, a tribute to poet Inês Lourenço and music every evening at seven.

Seventeen days of books, twenty concerts, no ticket. The Feira do Livro do Porto takes over the Jardins do Palácio de Cristal from 21 August to 6 September for its 13th edition, and the growth this year is in the programme rather than the retail: 144 stands, but more than 200 events. The music is the easiest part to plan around, because it keeps the same slot. There is a concert in the gardens every evening at 7pm, and the run of names covers several…

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Tony Carreira on the Friday, Bárbara Tinoco on the Saturday, Slow J on the Sunday and GNR closing on the Monday. New for 2026 is a Sunset Stage running 8pm to 9.30pm from 28 to 31 August, in the regional produce area.

Some fairs get organised. Others simply come back. Grândola's has been coming back for the better part of four centuries, which makes it one of the oldest free fairs in Portugal, and this year it takes over the town from 27 to 31 August, with one headliner a night on the main stage. Thursday the 27th opens with dance and afro sounds from Diego Gonzalez, Diego Miranda and Danni Gato. Friday belongs to Tony Carreira, whose songs most of the country can sing…

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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 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 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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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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The Feiras Novas run for six days and mark two centuries since the royal charter of 1826. Concertina parades, giant puppets, fado in the Paço do Marquês gardens and a historical procession on Sunday the 13th.

There are country festivals, and then there are the Feiras Novas. Ponte de Lima gives its whole town over to this one from 9 to 14 September, and 2026 is not an ordinary year for it: the festival turns 200, counting from the royal charter of 5 May 1826. If you have never been, drop any image of a stage and a headline act. That is not what this is. For six days there is music coming out of somewhere at all hours, oversized carnival figures move through the…

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The fair runs to 16 August in the Guarda district. A general pass is 18 euros, headline concerts are 5, and [entry is free up to and including age 12](https://www.cm-trancoso.pt/evento/feira-de-sao-bartolomeu-7-a-16-de-agosto-de-2026/).

If you looked at the August calendar and decided you had missed everything, Trancoso still has a full week to offer. The Feira de São Bartolomeu opened on 7 August and does not close until the 16th, which leaves seven nights of programme from Monday onwards. Carminho opened on Friday and Bárbara Tinoco played Saturday. Sunday was given over to folk music, with the ACRT festival and Marotos da Concertina. What follows is the heart of the run. Plutónio…

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The Azores festival returns to Santa Maria from 19 to 22 August with 13 acts, among them Terrakota, Queen Omega & The Royal Souls, Vitor Kley and Talco. Wednesday starts at 6pm at the Macela viewpoint; Thursday to Saturday begin at 10pm on Praia Formosa.

Maré de Agosto returns to Praia Formosa from 19 to 22 August, and the running order for all four nights is now set. Thirteen acts, two stages, on an island where the festival is more or less the social calendar for the month. The opening is the odd one out, in the best way. On Wednesday the 19th the Terra Stage goes up at the Macela viewpoint from 6pm, with the bay far below and the light going soft — Azorean acts We Sea and Antoine C play, alongside…

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It opened on 6 August and stays up until 6 September, with Fernando Daniel, Plutónio, Calema, Bárbara Bandeira and Maiara & Maraisa among the confirmed names.

Most Portuguese summer events are measured in weekends. This one is measured in weeks. The Feira de São Mateus opened in Viseu on Thursday and stays standing until 6 September, a run of 31 days that makes it one of the longest in the country. The ticket price is the headline. Most concerts cost 5 euros bought online, with two stated exceptions: MC Paiva at 7 euros and the Brazilian duo Maiara & Maraisa at 10. For a bill of this reach, that is pricing from…

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Totality falls only inside Montesinho Natural Park, at 19:31. The rest of the mainland sees 92% to 99% coverage, the Azores and Madeira 74% to 78%, and around 390 public events are scheduled nationwide.

There is a narrow strip of north-eastern Portugal where, on 12 August, the Sun goes out completely. Everywhere else the country gets a Sun that is nearly covered — and the gap between 99% and 100% is far bigger than the number makes it sound. Totality happens inside Montesinho Natural Park, in the municipality of Bragança, around the villages of Rio de Onor and Guadramil. It is the only place in the country where coverage reaches 100%, and it lasts a…

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From 7 to 9 August: Ye's only Portuguese concert, two rock and metal festivals running at once in the north and centre, the closing weekend of Semana do Mar in Horta, and the Volta a Portugal heading south.

August is at its fullest and this weekend shows it. There is a whole stadium waiting on a one-off concert, two festivals happening simultaneously 200 kilometres apart, an island wrapping up ten days of celebration, and a peloton crossing the country. Five things, Friday to Sunday. His only Portuguese date, on 7 August, outside Faro. It is his first show here since 2011, and this summer tour's production is built entirely around one enormous stage object…

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