The solstice arrived with a heat dome parked over Iberia. Next week gets seriously hot — and the wildfire danger climbs with it.

By Marta Carneiro

Illustrative · Photo: Jo Kassis / Pexels

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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