What's on across Portugal on 1 and 2 August, from Peniche's festa to a Porto craft market
Your guide to the 1 and 2 August weekend in Portugal: summer festas in Peniche, Mirandela and Ribeira de Pena, markets in Porto and Estremoz, open-air cinema and the last days of the Vivian Maier show.
August arrives on a Saturday this year, and it arrives well stocked. This is one of those weekends where the entire country seems to have agreed to throw a party at the same time, with the happy side effect that most of it costs nothing. Here is where to point the car.
Which festas are on this weekend?
Peniche is in the final stretch of its town festival, which started on 24 July and closes on Sunday 2 August, free to enter. It is a hard combination to beat: a summer festa with the Atlantic at the door and the fortress as a backdrop. Updated programmes live on the Peniche council website.
Up in Trás-os-Montes, the Festas de Mirandela wrap up on Saturday 1 August, also free. Anyone around Vila Real has the Festas da Vila and Feira do Linho in Ribeira de Pena, running 30 July to 2 August, with the linen fair giving it an old-romaria flavour that is worth the detour.
Out in the Azores the month’s big one begins: Semana do Mar in Horta starts on 31 July and runs to 9 August, so anyone on Faial catches the opening weekend straight away.
What if you would rather do markets?
Saturday morning is market country. In Porto, Mercado do Molhe brings together Portuguese craft, street food and live music, free entry. In Lisbon, Feira da Ladra fills Campo de Santa Clara again, between the Pantheon and São Vicente de Fora, while the Chiado hosts the second-hand book fair on Rua Anchieta, with old books, comics, postcards and maps.
In the Alentejo, Estremoz does the full set: the traditional market on Rossio Marquês de Pombal, where producers sell their own goods, plus the antiques and bric-a-brac fair beside it. And because it is the first Saturday of the month, Coimbra opens its Feira Sem Regras by the Santa Clara-a-Velha monastery from 9am to 6pm, and Barreiro runs its car boot sale from 10am to 5pm.
Anything to see before it closes?
Yes, and urgently. The Vivian Maier anthology in Porto shuts on Sunday 2 August after months at the Centro Português de Fotografia. It gathers more than 140 works by the photographer nobody had heard of until her archives surfaced in 2007, and part of the ticket revenue goes to the children’s cancer charity Acreditar.
To finish in low-effort mode, there is cinema under the stars: Cinema na Relva in Maia has its final free screening on Saturday, and in Lisbon the Cinecapitólio rooftop runs into September. If you still need a plan, our guide to August’s festivals covers the rest of the month.
Image: GualdimG / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
