The airline has 80% of this year's fuel bought forward at $67 a barrel and pays market price for the rest — and it has cut its annual passenger target by two million. In Portugal, the Azores lose every Ryanair flight from March.

If you are eyeing tickets for November or January, book earlier than usual. Ryanair warned this week that it expects to cut flights over the winter, and the reason is more precise than it sounds: about 80% of this year's fuel is bought forward at $67 a barrel, but the remaining 20% is paid at market price, with jet fuel trading near $140. Winter is, in the airline's own words, an unprofitable season. Fewer seats on sale usually means dearer fares for the…

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12.8 kilometres of dual carriageway now link the A6 junction to the EN18 at São Manços, built with 54.9 million euros of EU recovery money. The drop in city-centre traffic is the council's projection, not a measurement.

Drive to the Alentejo this weekend and you no longer have to go through Évora. The new eastern bypass on the IP2 opened to traffic on Thursday: 12.8 kilometres of motorway-standard road, two lanes each way, joining the A6's Évora Nascente junction to the IP2/EN18 near São Manços. It cost 54.9 million euros, paid for out of Portugal's EU-funded Recovery and Resilience Plan. What it closes is a gap that pushed traffic between southern Portugal, Spain,…

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We counted IPMA's rural fire risk index municipality by municipality for the next three days. Twelve are at the maximum level today, 21 tomorrow and 26 on Sunday — after the heat warnings expire.

Fourteen districts woke up on Friday under a yellow hot-weather warning, and that warning runs out at 6pm on Saturday. That is the part everyone will report. The less comfortable part is what happens next: the heat leaves the warning bulletins while the fire risk is still climbing. We pulled IPMA's rural fire risk index — the one civil protection uses to decide where to position crews — and counted all 278 mainland municipalities, one by one, for today,…

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Berlin formally blamed Russia for the 4 August attempt on Leipzig/Halle. Portugal called the ambassador in on Wednesday, France did the same, and Brussels is lining up 1,600 more sanctions listings.

Russia's ambassador to Lisbon was called into the foreign ministry on Wednesday morning. Foreign minister Paulo Rangel announced it as he arrived at the informal meeting of EU foreign ministers in County Wicklow, Ireland, and the reason sat 2,500 kilometres away: an explosive-laden drone that tried to hit Leipzig/Halle airport on 4 August. The attack failed. Attribution took nearly a month. On Tuesday the German government formally held Russia…

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The second edition of the cheque-livro closed on 31 August with 45,075 vouchers redeemed. The ministry led with an 85.9% usage rate, which measures something much narrower.

Portugal's cheque-livro scheme closed its second edition on Monday, 31 August, and the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport put the figures out a day later. It issued 52,448 vouchers worth €30 each. Of those, 45,075 were spent, pushing the redemption rate from 82.4% to 85.9%. That is the headline number, and it is a good one. It also measures something quite narrow: of every hundred young people who asked for the voucher, nearly 86 walked into a bookshop…

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Carris plans an international design-and-build tender in the first quarter of 2027. The incline and the street stay as they are; the mechanism will be an entirely new system.

Carris has stopped using the word rebuild. Whatever replaces the Glória funicular will be a new installation designed from nothing, not a safer copy of the car that ran away down the hill on 3 September 2025 and killed 16 people. Company president Rui Lopo set out the thinking on Monday at the Ordem dos Engenheiros in Lisbon. The dates are the part that will travel: an international design-and-build tender in the first quarter of 2027, and a working…

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Three CGTP-affiliated unions have called out the general career grades of the public administration — operational assistants, technical assistants and senior technicians — with a Lisbon march at 11am. They want pay talks opened now rather than next year.

Say public-sector strike in Portugal and most people picture teachers, or nurses. The one called on Monday for 2 October is neither, and it is bigger than either. It was announced jointly by the national federation of public and social service unions, by STAL, which organises local and regional government staff, and by the union for Lisbon city council workers. All three sit under the CGTP confederation. The strike covers the general career grades across…

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The Cascais clinic has gone insolvent and patients learned through its own app that their frozen embryos are moving elsewhere. Portugal's regulator requires six months' notice and a destination it picks itself.

Ovom Care opened in Cascais in 2025 on venture capital money and has now filed for insolvency. Dozens of patients found out through the clinic's own app that their frozen embryos and gametes are being moved to another centre in Lisbon. The phones stopped being answered. The emails go nowhere. In twenty years of Portugal's assisted-reproduction law, no fertility clinic had gone under before. A licensed centre cannot simply switch off the lights. The…

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Performance-review reforms and the unfreezing of teaching careers left the polytechnics carrying costs nobody reimbursed. Around 20 million euros of VAT on student residences is still working its way back too.

Portugal's polytechnic institutions say they are carrying roughly 38 million euros of spending they never asked for and have not been reimbursed for. Two things produced it: the arrival of SIADAP, the public-administration performance-review system, and the unfreezing of teaching careers. Asked how institutions are meant to absorb that, the head of the polytechnics' coordinating council, Luís Loures, gave a one-word version of the answer. So far they have…

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The National Energy Storage Strategy sets 6.9 GW installed by 2030 and 9.76 GW by 2040. It opened for public comment on Saturday on Participa.pt and stays open for 20 days.

Storing electricity is the dull problem that decides whether renewables are any use at seven in the evening. Portugal already makes plenty of sun and wind. What it does not yet have is somewhere to keep them until they are needed. The National Energy Storage Strategy, known here as the ENAE, is the attempt to fix that with figures rather than intentions, and it opened for public consultation on Saturday on the Participa.pt portal, where it stays open for…

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Portugal's rail accident investigator has missed its own 3 September deadline. It issued six safety recommendations instead — four to Carris, two to the transport regulator — and both accepted them.

Next Thursday marks a year since the Glória funicular came off its track on the descent towards Restauradores. Sixteen people died and 23 were hurt. That anniversary was also the deadline the investigators had set themselves for the final report, and it will not be met: the GPIAAF says its conclusions are now expected near the end of the first quarter of 2027, because the technical testing is still running.

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Despacho 10430/2026, published on 21 August, settles the full year rather than just the start: three breaks totalling 36 days, and an end date that is staggered by year group, with the youngest children in school until 30 June.

The start dates have been known since early August. What was missing was the instrument that makes them binding and settles the rest of the year, and it appeared in the official gazette on 21 August: Despacho 10430/2026, which amends the multi-year framework and sets the 2026/27 school calendar. The September picture, briefly. Pre-school and the three cycles of basic education go back between the 11th and the 15th, with each school cluster choosing its…

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The Royal House said the king died peacefully at Oslo University Hospital at 6.35am on Friday, having been admitted on 17 August with a blood infection. His son became King Haakon VIII at the moment of his death.

King Harald V of Norway died on Friday morning at the age of 89. The Royal House said he died peacefully at Oslo University Hospital Rikshospitalet at 6.35am and took the rest of its website offline while it makes the necessary changes. He had been in hospital since 17 August, treated for a bacterial infection in his blood. He was Europe's oldest reigning monarch and had held the Norwegian throne since 1991. His son Haakon became king at the moment of his…

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Copernicus confirmed a global sea surface average of 21.1C on 22 August, beating the 21.09C set in March 2024. The month it happened in is the part that matters, and the mechanism the EU service describes reaches the Atlantic coast in autumn.

On 22 August the average temperature at the surface of the world's oceans reached 21.1C. Copernicus, the European Union's climate change service, has confirmed it as the highest daily figure on record, measured against the ERA5 dataset that runs back to 1979. The previous record was 21.09C, set in March 2024. A hundredth of a degree is not, on its own, a story. The month is.

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Portugal's health service publishes its telemedicine numbers as open data, so we summed them across every institution: 29,778 consultations in 2019, 354,254 at the 2021 peak, 237,470 last year. Through May 2026 the count is 133,681, up 37 per cent year on year.

Portugal's health service publishes a great deal about itself, and almost nobody reads it. So we opened the SNS Transparency Portal, pulled the telemedicine consultations dataset and added up every institution, month by month, back to 2013. The series runs cumulatively within each calendar year, so the December figure is the year's total. In 2019, the last full year before covid, SNS hospitals and local health units recorded 29,778 telemedicine…

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The Council of Ministers topped up the Territórios Resilientes programme and widened the list of councils it covers, seven months after the storms that killed at least 19 people.

On 20 August the Council of Ministers approved a resolution raising the Territórios Resilientes programme to €80 million, the fund set up to repair riverside and coastal areas hit by the storms and floods of January and February this year. The top-up is around €3.5 million and goes to five councils: Fronteira, Manteigas, Marvão, Nelas and Santa Comba Dão. Split evenly, that is €700,000 each.

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An order signed on 25 August sets what community pharmacies receive for each flu or Covid-19 vaccine, capped at €7.6 million. The DGS rule naming the eligible groups and the start date has still not appeared. Last year it came out on 9 September.

The state has done its half of the arithmetic. Every flu or Covid-19 vaccine given in a community pharmacy this autumn and winter is worth €3.15 to the pharmacy that gives it, under the order published in Diário da República on 25 August. The money comes out of the ACSS budget, moves through the local health units and only then reaches the counter, with an overall ceiling of €7.6 million.

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We added up the burnt-area figures councils and Civil Protection gave for Torre de Moncorvo, Arouca and Santo Tirso. Not a single house burned in Arouca, but four firefighters went off the road into a 150-metre ravine on their way to the fire, and one is being moved to Gaia for surgery.

A week ago we wrote about three fires tying up almost a thousand crew at once in Torre de Moncorvo, Arouca and Santo Tirso. The fires went out, the news trucks left, and nobody did the simple sum: how much did all of that actually burn. So we did it, adding up the figures each council and Civil Protection released as the fires were brought under control. It comes to roughly 5,200 hectares. By far the biggest was Cabeça Boa, in Torre de Moncorvo, which…

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The GNR says the car pulled out of a parking space on Rua Francisco Sá Carneiro at around 3am, ignored two orders to stop and drove at the pedestrians and the officers in front of it. One of the twelve is seriously hurt and two are GNR soldiers.

Twelve people were hurt in the early hours of Tuesday in Albufeira when a car drove at pedestrians and at a GNR police line on Rua Francisco Sá Carneiro, the bar-lined street everyone in the Algarve simply calls the Oura strip. One of them is seriously injured. Two are GNR soldiers. According to the Faro Territorial Command's account, it began around 3am with a car parked on the public road pulling away. Officers signalled it to stop. The driver did not:…

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The partial phase starts at 3.33am in Lisbon and peaks at 5.13am, with 96.3% of the lunar disc inside Earth's umbra. Unlike the 12 August solar eclipse, this one needs no eye protection.

Two weeks after half the country spent an afternoon squinting at the Sun through cardboard glasses, there is another eclipse coming. This one asks for the opposite: nothing over your eyes, and an alarm set. In the early hours of Friday 28 August, the Moon crosses Earth's shadow. Technically it is a partial eclipse, but only just. At greatest eclipse, 96.3% of the lunar disc sits inside the umbra, the part of the shadow where Earth blocks the Sun…

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Heavy showers and thunder across most of the mainland until the end of Sunday, with up to 20 millimetres of rain in a single hour and southerly winds strengthening along the west coast.

Fourteen of mainland Portugal's eighteen districts spent Sunday under a yellow weather warning, and the reason is the one nobody plans for in late August: heavy showers and thunderstorms. The districts are Aveiro, Braga, Bragança, Castelo Branco, Coimbra, Guarda, Leiria, Lisbon, Porto, Santarém, Setúbal, Viana do Castelo, Vila Real and Viseu. The warning from the Portuguese Institute for Sea and Atmosphere runs to the end of the day, and unusually for a…

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Provisional estimates from the EuroMOMO monitoring network put excess deaths above 32,000 between mid-July and mid-August. Germany alone accounts for 14,000, and the summer is not over.

The books on the European summer are starting to close, and the reading is grim. Between mid-July and mid-August, the EuroMOMO monitoring platform estimates more than 32,000 deaths above the expected level across the 23 countries that feed it data. Portugal's share, according to figures from the DGS health authority, is more than 600 excess deaths between mid-June and the end of July. These are provisional numbers and they will move over the coming weeks.…

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Around 500 zones are earmarked for solar and 300 for onshore wind across more than 147 of the mainland's 278 municipalities, each capped at 1% of its own area. Inside them, licensing runs on a shorter clock.

Developers, town halls and environmental groups have spent years arguing about the same thing from opposite sides of the table: nobody could say with any confidence where Portugal actually wanted its solar and wind farms. This week the government answered with a map. On Thursday the Council of Ministers signed off more than 800 renewable acceleration zones spread across more than 147 mainland municipalities. That figure is the government's own, and it…

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The Ministry of Infrastructure has set the third week of September for extending the Passe Ferroviário Verde to urban rail services in Lisbon and Porto, and says the Fertagus line will be included. The measure is costed at 1.5 million euros a year.

There is a date now. The Passe Ferroviário Verde will start covering urban rail services in Lisbon and Porto in the third week of September, according to a statement issued on Friday by the Ministry of Infrastructure and Housing. The statement also added something the announcement a week ago did not contain: the pass will be extended to the Fertagus line across the Tagus. That third week is European Mobility Week, which runs from 16 to 22 September. The…

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A study published on Thursday by the Autoridade da Concorrência warns that tenders to subcontract CP's suburban lines will only attract bidders if they guarantee access to rolling stock, depots and staff. The government's model is due in September.

The government wants private operators to run some of CP's suburban lines, starting with the Cascais line into Lisbon. Portugal's competition authority has looked at that plan and concluded, in a study released on Thursday, that the tender risks arriving with nobody in it unless it first solves a very unglamorous problem: a new entrant has no trains, no depots and nobody qualified to drive. The recommendation is blunt. Tender procedures should secure…

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Residents aged 24 and over travel free on the MUV, STUV and Mobi Viseu Dão Lafões networks within the municipality from 1 September. Passes go on sale on Monday and require proof of tax residence in Viseu.

From 1 September, anyone living in the Viseu municipality who is 24 or older stops paying to ride the city's buses. Mayor João Azevedo announced the measure on Thursday. It covers three networks: MUV, lines 22 and 23 of the STUV service, and Mobi Viseu Dão Lafões, the last of these only for journeys inside the municipality. The age cut-off is not arbitrary. Children and young people up to 23 already travel free under the national scheme, as do military…

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We opened the National Exam Board's Reports and Statistics page on 20 August and counted what is on it. The most recent secondary-school entry is from 2024. For 2025 and 2026 there are no files at all, even though this year's averages have already circulated.

We did something simple this morning. We opened the Reports and Statistics page of Portugal's National Exam Board, which is where the state publishes national exam results, and counted the files year by year. This is not difficult investigative work. It is a public page, on a single tab, and it takes ten minutes. Here is what is there. For 2024, five secondary-school entries: the ENES 2024 database plus four statistical documents, covering results by…

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Statistics Portugal's monthly vital figures show more marriages, fewer June births than in 2025, and a natural balance that is less negative. Across the first half of the year, live births were up 0.8%.

June was a month for getting married. Portugal recorded 4,271 weddings, 453 more than in May and 333 more than in June last year, an 8.5% rise year on year, according to the monthly vital statistics published by INE. The rest of the picture is more mixed, and the two halves of it are worth keeping apart. There were 7,068 live births in June, 200 fewer than in May and 171 fewer than in June 2025 — a fall of 2.4% on the year.

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Deco Proteste's weekly count rose 1.48 euros in seven days. Tinned tuna, cake flour and butter beans did most of the pushing.

Some sums do not wait for the end of the month. They happen at the supermarket till. This week the trolley of 63 essential goods that consumer body Deco Proteste has tracked since 2022 costs 253.55 euros, 1.48 euros more than a week ago, according to the analysis the association published on Wednesday. A weekly move that small is easy to shrug off. What it does when it accumulates is harder to ignore. At the start of this year the identical basket cost…

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SGIFR figures to 18 August count 6,572 rural fires and 60,572 hectares burnt — 185,000 hectares less than 2025, but 748 more fires, and more than half of them started on low or moderate risk days.

Between 1 January and last Tuesday, 60,572 hectares of scrub and forest burned in Portugal across 6,572 rural fires. The figures come from the rural fire management portal run by AGIF, and they pull in opposite directions. Start with the good half. Over the same stretch of 2025, Portugal lost 245,760 hectares. This year's total is 185,000 hectares lower, and a shade over a quarter of last summer's damage. Now the other half. There were 5,824 fires by this…

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