The main shock hit at 1.31pm local time on 24 October (2.31am UTC) off northern Vanuatu, prompting the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center to warn of hazardous waves for parts of the country. A 6.3 followed four minutes later. By 9.38am UTC the USGS had logged 26 quakes of magnitude 4.5 or more. There were no immediate reports of damage.

By Marta Carneiro

Chart: Tugadaily · data USGS

In the early hours of Sunday 25 October, 2:00 becomes 1:00 on the mainland and in Madeira, and 1:00 becomes midnight in the Azores. We worked out sunset in six cities: on Sunday it comes an hour earlier than on Saturday, from 17:30 in Bragança to 18:23 in Funchal.

You get an extra hour in bed tonight. In the early hours of Sunday 25 October, when clocks on the mainland and in Madeira reach 2:00, they go back to 1:00. The Azores change at the same universal moment, which there means 1:00 becomes midnight. Phones and laptops will sort themselves out. The oven, the microwave, the car dashboard and the kitchen wall clock that nobody has touched since March are on you. The bit you notice is the light. We ran the sunset…

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Britain's new Be Ready campaign asks households to keep enough to last three days without services: 3 litres of drinking water per person per day, food that needs no fridge, a battery radio, a torch, cash and paper copies of documents. It is the first stage of a three-year campaign, modelled on France, Ireland and the Netherlands.

The UK government wants every household to be able to cope for three days on its own if the power, water, phones or internet go down. The campaign is called Be Ready, and the Cabinet Office launched it on 22 October as the first stage of a three-year push that will build gradually, with radio and social media advertising aimed at families with young children and older people.

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The magnitude 5.5 earthquake at 12:19 Italian time on Friday, in the Tyrrhenian Sea near Alicudi, was felt from Palermo to Catania and triggered a tsunami alert that was lifted about an hour later. Counting INGV's catalogue, we found 80 tremors of magnitude 2 or more in that patch of sea on the day, against 9 in the previous seven days.

A magnitude 5.5 earthquake struck the Tyrrhenian Sea off Sicily at 12:19 Italian time on Friday (11:19 in Lisbon). The epicentre was offshore, north-west of the Aeolian Islands near Alicudi, about 9 kilometres down, according to the event record at Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology. It was felt from Palermo to Catania and across the Aeolian Islands. INGV's Tsunami Alert Centre issued a warning straight away, as the international…

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The government approved 421 million euros for new Porto Metro lines to Gondomar and Trofa. On the Trofa line only two of nine stations are metro; the other seven are served by electric metrobus, with a change at Muro.

Portugal's Council of Ministers approved 421 million euros on Thursday for two new Porto Metro lines, one to Gondomar and one to Trofa. The government's statement does not draw the distinction. On the Trofa line, though, the metro only reaches the second station: from Muro onwards, you continue by electric bus. The Gondomar line is the conventional one. It runs for about seven kilometres and nine stations from Estádio do Dragão to Souto, in central…

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Maria João Carneiro, a volunteer with the Resende fire brigade, was struck by a falling tree while fighting a blaze in Barrô and died hours later at Lamego Hospital. She is the second firefighter to die on duty in Portugal this year.

Maria João Carneiro, a 24-year-old volunteer firefighter, died in the early hours of Friday after being struck by a falling tree while fighting a fire in Barrô, in the municipality of Resende, in Portugal's Viseu district. She was pulled out alive and taken to Lamego Hospital, where she died hours later. She served with the Resende volunteer fire brigade. The fire, in scrubland, broke out at 8:36pm on Thursday and has its own entry on Portugal's fogos.pt…

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We added up the daily records the SNS has published since 2016. Between 1 and 18 September there were 1,028 flu consultations in primary care, 12% more than last year and the highest in the series. Flu season itself does not usually start until November.

Portugal's health centres recorded 1,028 flu consultations between 1 and 18 September. That is the highest figure for that window in ten Septembers of daily records: 918 last year, 727 in 2024, 700 in 2023, and just 519 in 2019, the last autumn before the pandemic. Very nearly double. Nobody has published this number because nobody worked it out. The data has been open for years, updated most days, sitting there waiting for someone to add it up. We went…

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Three ignitions merged into one front on Saturday across Vila Nova de Poiares, Arganil and Góis, drawing 806 personnel, 260 vehicles and 15 aircraft. Three firefighters were lightly injured. The maximum DECIR phase ends on 30 September.

The fire that on Saturday joined Vila Nova de Poiares, Arganil and Góis into a single front has been in resolution since 00:45 on Sunday. More than 300 personnel stayed on the ground waiting for flare-ups, which is always the quiet part of these nights. It began as three ignitions. Two broke out very close together at Sabouga, in the parish of Lavegadas in Vila Nova de Poiares, reported at 13:40; the third had been logged five minutes earlier at…

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Vila Viçosa's national heritage file opened in August 2018 and was renamed this week. The council wants Monumento Nacional status signed off by December — a year and a half before the World Heritage Committee next meets.

Vila Viçosa is running two heritage bids at once, and only one of them answers to Paris. The two get blurred together constantly, which is a shame, because their timelines could hardly be further apart. The first is domestic. It has been open since August 2018, and this week it changed its name. Anúncio n.º 248/2026, published in the official gazette on 16 September, amends the original opening of the procedure, redraws the provisional protection zone…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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.

There is a date at last. Portugal's autumn-winter vaccination campaign opens on 30 September at National Health Service units, participating community pharmacies and other vaccination points. The norms setting out who is entitled to what came out this week, after a stretch in which the date simply did not exist and the calendar was being guessed from last year's.

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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…

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