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.

When

29 August 2026

Where

Lisbon, Cascais, Porto and Lagoa

Price

Free to €5 for most; Kalorama passes from €120

By Leonor Sampaio

Image: Glen Bowman / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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,…

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…

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,…

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…

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…