The 2026-2027 seasonal campaign opens on 30 September at SNS units, participating pharmacies and other vaccination points. Free flu vaccination now covers children aged two to four, and the Covid-19 recommendation moves from 60 to 70.

By Marta Carneiro

Image: Pete from Liverpool / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

The European Commission proposed €489 million from the EU Solidarity Fund on 17 September for the January and February storms. Portugal's share is €261 million, of which €65.37 million was already advanced in July. The rest waits on a vote in Parliament and Council.

On 17 September the European Commission proposed mobilising €489 million from the EU Solidarity Fund for the storms that swept southern Europe at the start of the year. Portugal's slice is €261 million. Spain, Italy and Malta share the remaining €227 million between them. The gap reflects what happened here. Between 22 January and 15 February, Portugal took a run of unusually intense storms, with high winds, heavy seas, concentrated rainfall, flooding and…

The Furnas classification ran for eight days and lapsed. We went back to the CIVISA page and counted again: Santa Bárbara and the west Terceira fissural system, both at V1 since July, and Manadas on São Jorge, at V1 since March 2024.

Furnas is back at V0. The classification CIVISA gave the São Miguel volcano on 8 September ran for eight days, was not renewed, and the system has returned to the resting state it occupies almost all of the time. The announcement itself is not the interesting part, and the regional press has already carried it. The count is. When Furnas went up, we counted the entries on the CIVISA alerts page and found four Azorean volcanic systems sitting at V1…

IPMA's August bulletin is out and it closes a question left open ten days ago. Mean temperature came in 0.16C above normal, the average daily high came in below normal, and more than two and a half times the usual rain fell.

Ten days ago we were left holding a question. Copernicus had just handed western Europe its hottest summer on record, 2.54C above the 1991-2020 average, and Portugal — which sits inside the geographic box that produced that record — appeared nowhere on any of the lists. The national bulletin that would explain the absence did not exist yet. It does now. The answer is almost anticlimactic. Mainland Portugal's mean August air temperature was 23.07C, an…

Portugal's interior minister said on Friday that the Government is preparing a legislative change creating a dedicated fraud offence, prosecutable without a complaint, for selling substances passed off as narcotics.

Anyone who has walked through Lisbon's Baixa in the early evening knows the approach. Someone falls into step, offers hashish under their breath, and what is actually in their hand, almost every time, is pressed bay leaf — culinary laurel compacted into a block and sold to visitors at the price of a drug it is not. That is not currently a crime. At most it is an administrative offence for unlicensed street trading, which is why officers can identify a…

The petition to scrap the Volta deposit-return scheme reached parliament on 15 August with 34,211 signatures, against a legal minimum of 7,500 for a plenary debate. A month on it stands at 37,134 and is still waiting to be ruled admissible.

The petition calling for an end to Portugal's Volta scheme has 37,134 signatures. That is the figure that went round the press this week, and it is a big one. It is also not the figure that decides anything. For a petition to be considered in plenary, Portugal's right-of-petition law sets a minimum of 7,500 subscribers. When this one arrived at the Assembleia da República on 15 August it already carried 34,211 — four and a half times what it needed. The…

Botond Roska and José-Alain Sahel have won the 2026 António Champalimaud Vision Award, worth one million euros. It recognises two decades of work on optogenetic therapies, which make surviving retinal cells respond to light after the eye's photoreceptors are gone.

There is a one-million-euro science prize that leaves Lisbon every year and is the largest in its field anywhere in the world. It is the António Champalimaud Vision Award, given by the Champalimaud Foundation, and the 2026 edition now has its winners: Botond Roska and José-Alain Sahel. Roska is a neuroscientist and a founding director of the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology in Basel. Sahel is an ophthalmologist and clinician-scientist at…

The investigation into the 10 August shooting that hit a 42-year-old Swedish visitor has changed hands and changed charge. The three men sought by Portugal's judicial police presented themselves on Tuesday and were being questioned that night on suspicion of attempted homicide.

The three men wanted by Portugal's Polícia Judiciária over the Rua Augusta shooting presented themselves to the authorities on Tuesday. By late evening they were being questioned. The offence named is attempted homicide. Investigators had identified them during the day. A morning search operation failed to find them, and the judicial police obtained an undertaking from their defence lawyers that all three would come in before the day was out. They did.…

Iran, Iraq and five Gulf states were due to meet on Monday to draw shipping corridors through the strait. It was called off the night before, with no new date, after Riyadh filed amendments to a proposal Tehran and Muscat had already settled.

The meeting that was meant to draw shipping lanes through the Strait of Hormuz never opened. It was set for Monday in Salalah, the port city on Oman's southern coast, and it was called off on Sunday night with no new date attached. The host said so itself. Oman's foreign ministry announced the postponement of the Salalah regional meeting, citing the need to build the right conditions for constructive dialogue, and foreign minister Badr Albusaidi framed…

Portugal's 2025 National Health Survey puts blood-pressure checks at 80.2% among people with no formal education, the highest of any education level. On colonoscopies the same group drops to 37.3%, against 55.9% for graduates.

Statistics Portugal released another slice of the 2025 National Health Survey on Tuesday, this one on access to healthcare. The figure in its title is that 51.4% of people aged 50 and over said they had had a colonoscopy in the previous ten years. Just over half. The headline average is not the interesting part. What the full table shows is how that average splits by education, and that it splits the opposite way to everything around it.

Portugal's health directorate expects poor air quality on 14 and 15 September across Lisbon and the Tagus Valley, the Alentejo and the Algarve, with PM10 climbing. Then the heat breaks, and on the coast Tuesday's high falls by as much as nine degrees.

An air mass off the North African deserts is crossing mainland Portugal on Monday and Tuesday, carrying suspended dust with it. Portugal's health directorate has issued the notice it puts out for these episodes, and this one is aimed at the southern half of the country: Lisbon and the Tagus Valley, the Alentejo and the Algarve above all. What rises is PM10, the inhalable particles that occur naturally rather than coming out of an exhaust or a chimney.…

Houthi forces reached Perim on Friday, the island that splits the entrance to the Red Sea into two shipping lanes. At the other end of the route, the International Maritime Organization counts 21 ships attacked and ten seafarers killed since February.

From a kitchen table in Portugal the Red Sea can feel like somebody else's problem. It is not. A large share of what reaches Europe from Asia comes through it, and on Friday the corridor narrowed again. Houthi fighters reached Perim, the uninhabited island that divides the Bab el-Mandeb into two shipping lanes, after Yemeni government troops pulled back. The day before, they had taken the port of Mokha further up the same coast. Hold Perim and you…

The figures come from a self-regulation protocol signed on Friday by the city council, the taxi associations, airport operator ANA and Lisbon's tourism association. They are not municipal tariffs, signing up is voluntary, and consumer group DECO has already questioned whether the arrangement is lawful.

If you land at Lisbon and walk to the taxi rank at Humberto Delgado, from 15 October you will know the price before you get in. A ride into the city costs 16 euros in the inner zone and 19 euros in the outer one, on weekdays during the day. At night, at weekends and on public holidays those become 20 and 23 euros. The protocol was signed on Friday by Lisbon city council, the Portuguese Taxi Federation and ANTRAL, with airport operator ANA and the Lisbon…

The study presented in Guarda names the Azores, Beja, Bragança, Castelo Branco, Évora, Faro, Guarda, Madeira, Portalegre, Vila Real and Viseu. The proposals run from income tax deductions and property tax relief to extra holiday.

Portugal's medical council went to Guarda to present a study and came back with a closed list. Eleven territories are hard to staff with doctors: the Azores, Beja, Bragança, Castelo Branco, Évora, Faro, Guarda, Madeira, Portalegre, Vila Real and Viseu. The complaint attached to the list is about method. The work, coordinated by council president Carlos Cortes with doctors from several specialities, argues that the response so far has come in scattered,…

The GNR's Safe School programme covers more than 4,400 schools and around 670,000 pupils, and the PSP has been out since 7 September. Simple assault was the most common offence, with 950 cases.

The GNR launched its Safe School programme for 2026/2027 today, an operation covering more than 4,400 schools and roughly 670,000 pupils across the territory the force polices. The PSP did not wait for today, stepping up its presence around schools and on home-to-school routes from 7 September. The figure that puts the rest in context sits in the same statement. Over the last school year, the GNR recorded 2,631 crimes in school settings.