Four of the Algarve’s submissions for grants under the government's Participatory Budget Portugal scheme have received funding.
More than 1,400 ideas were received and the public chose from 691 national and regional projects.
Faro faces a shortage of space in which to bury its dead with cemetery space all but occupied.
According to the mayor, Rogério Bacalhau, around 2,000 corpses in the ‘Cemitério Novo’ are not decomposing quickly enough. Normally, bodied are dug up after five years and the remains moved to make space for new arrivals.
The budget to construct the new bridge to Faro Island was set so low that it attracted zero offers from civil engineering companies.
The tender was launched in November 2017 and stipulated that the maximum payable was €2.5 million. After this less than enthusiastic response, the Council has revised the spend, upwards, to €3.5 million and now has even less chance of getting the bridge built.
The Ria Formosa islanders seem only to have one political friend left, in the form of the Left Bloc which is insistent that the government sticks to its anti-demolition legislation and halts the destruction of 14 further houses this November.
The Bloquistas are adamant that the Minister for the Environment explains the latest round of planned demolitions at Hangars and Farol, now scheduled for the 7th of next month.
The proposed new civil airport at the Montijo Air Force base should have radar installed to detect flocks of birds, according to the amended environmental report.
The Association of Portuguese Airline Pilots already are saying that the radar to detect birds near the airport is a sign that the choice of the site is wrong.
Hurricane Leslie is highly likely to hit Madeira late on Saturday but will have been downgraded to a ‘tropical storm,’ according to the Portuguese IPMA weather service.
This severe weather system has been hard hard to pin down, with different modelling programme offering different scenarios and the fact that the storm itself has been behaving erratically, meandering around the ocean since September 23rd.
Lisbon Council is not granting any new Alojamento Local licences in five districts of the capital as part of an attempt to stop these areas becoming ‘tourist only’ zones.
According to a Council report, Urban Tourism Study in Lisbon,’ the districts of Alfama, Mouraria e Castelo have been affected with Bairro Alto and Madragoa soon to follow.
The eastern Algarve municipality of Alcoutim started its baby-friendly policy in 2014, hoping to encourage mums to move to the area and for family-minded locals not to leave.
The support payment scheme started slowly, with only five births qualifying for support in the first year, but the Council says that now it’s four years into the open-ended programme, this is the measure that now contributes the most to the increasing birth rate in the county.
