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.

By Marta Carneiro

Image: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio / Ernie Wright

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…

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.…

Around 500 zones are earmarked for solar and 300 for onshore wind, covering roughly 1% of the mainland. 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 roughly 170 mainland municipalities. About 500 are earmarked for photovoltaic solar…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

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…

The fire at Cabeça Boa, in Torre de Moncorvo, drew 413 personnel, 135 vehicles and five aircraft on its own. Arouca and Santo Tirso accounted for the rest, while nine districts stayed under an orange weather warning until 6pm.

Nearly a thousand firefighters were tied up on three fires on Tuesday, and not one of them was under control by the end of the afternoon. The largest was burning at Cabeça Boa, in the Torre de Moncorvo district of Bragança, where at 1.10pm the tally stood at 413 personnel, 135 vehicles and five aircraft — more resources than any other incident in the country. In Arouca, in the Aveiro district, a fire that began on Monday night in the parishes of Cabreiros…

The Taxa Zero ao Volante campaign runs nationwide from 18 to 24 August. Of every 100 road crash victims autopsied in Portugal in 2025, 28 were over the legal alcohol limit — and 78% of those were at criminal levels.

Driving anywhere this week, expect more checkpoints than usual. Road safety authority ANSR has launched the Taxa Zero ao Volante campaign with the GNR and the PSP, running nationwide until 24 August and aimed squarely at drink-driving. It is the eighth of eleven campaigns in this year's National Enforcement Plan. ANSR handles the awareness side; the two police forces put more units on the road, concentrated where serious crashes cluster.

The fire started on the Spanish side of the border early on Saturday, crossed into the Montesinho natural park and destroyed a Vinhais fire engine with five crew aboard. Civil protection declared it under control at 7.50am on Sunday.

The fire that pushed into the Montesinho natural park was declared under control at 7.50am on Sunday, a little over 24 hours after it started. It cost five injured firefighters, one destroyed engine and a village emptied overnight. It began at 4.36am on Saturday on the Spanish side of the border and crossed into the municipality of Vinhais, in the Bragança district. At around 7pm, a forest firefighting vehicle belonging to the Vinhais brigade was caught…

The quake struck the north coast of Flores at 5.58am local time on Saturday. More than 1,300 homes are damaged, about 5,000 people are displaced and over 230 aftershocks were recorded on day one.

A magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck off the Indonesian island of Flores early on Saturday, killing at least 51 people. The epicentre sat about 68 kilometres north-northwest of the town of Ende, in East Nusa Tenggara province, at 5.58am local time — figures recorded on the US Geological Survey's event page for the quake. The toll climbed through the weekend. It began at two confirmed deaths in the first hours, passed 38 and then 47, and reached 51 on Sunday…