A giant bouncy-castle weekend at Portimão Arena, a night-time mystery hunt at the Benfica Museum, a spooky reading with live music at Évora's Paço de São Miguel, story sessions in Coimbra, a library night in Braga and a party in Albufeira. Times, prices and booking.

When

30 October 2026

Where

Braga, Coimbra, Lisbon, Évora, Portimão and Albufeira

Price

Free to €26

Organizer

Various

By Leonor Sampaio

Illustrative · Photo: Rafał Nagrodzki / Pexels

The Feira Nacional do Cavalo in Golegã reaches its 50th edition under a new name, Caixa Golegã Feira Nacional do Cavalo, from 6 to 15 November, alongside the 27th International Lusitano Horse Fair and the São Martinho fair. The pilgrims' procession is on 11 November.

Golegã fills up with horses, wide-brimmed hats and the smell of roasting chestnuts from 6 to 15 November. It's the 50th Feira Nacional do Cavalo, Portugal's national horse fair, and it arrives with a new name: Caixa Golegã Feira Nacional do Cavalo, after a partnership with state bank Caixa Geral de Depósitos, which turns 150 this year. Running at the same time are the 27th International Lusitano Horse Fair and the São Martinho fair, which is where it all…

Arouca's Chestnut Festival fills the old town until Sunday, Mértola's Hunting Fair moves to a new site, Braga's Semibreve wraps up, and Lisbon has a family-and-pets party at Alameda and an independent book fair at Mercado de Arroios. Clocks go back on Sunday.

October already smells of roast chestnuts, and this is the weekend Portugal starts taking that seriously. Here are five plans from the Minho to the Alentejo, most of them free. And a bonus on Sunday: at 2am the clocks go back to 1am, so there is an extra hour to spend wherever you like. Arouca's old town is the venue, with activities spread across Terreiro de Santa Mafalda, Avenida 25 de Abril, Praça Brandão de Vasconcelos and the town park. The Arouca…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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.

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.

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…

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…

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…

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…

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:…