Vila Real de Santo António’s municipal market is to have a €425,000 make-over which includes turning part of the building into a restaurant and leisure zone.
The four month job includes replacing the old roof, remodeling the sales spaces and the toilets, painting inside and out and the improvement of the drainage.
In a blow that will see anti-oil protest groups crying 'foul,' the ebullient mayor of Aljezur, José Amarelinho, has suffered possibly a fatal blow in his struggle to stay out of prison and hang onto his job.
The outspoken Aljezur mayor has long been a thorn in the side of the government as his spirited defence of his coastline, under threat from a still-active offshore oil drilling licence awarded to the Galp-ENI consortium, has been instrumental in the wider fight to call a halt to the government’s plans to turn parts of the country into oil and gas production zones.
Portugal’s government yet again has been caught out for issuing worthy sound-bites to solve urgent social problems and then doing precisely nothing, or as little as possible, with aid ‘on the way’ or delayed due to a variety of increasingly implausible excuses.
The money for the victims of this summer’s fires have been left waiting for cash while their homes lie in charred ruins, with livestock dead and farming equipment unusable.
After a gap of six years, the electricity regulator again is going to test EDP electricity meters.
The last audit led to EDP being told to repay €11 million to those customers that it knowingly had been ripping-off.
According to data released by the Algarve's hotels association AHETA, the average occupancy rate last December was 39.9%, 2.3% above 2016.
It was Portuguese holidaymakers that contributed the most to this welcome increase, up 3.2 percentage points. The Spanish, German and Dutch markets registered significant increases, while the British market presented the biggest fall with a drop of 3.6 percentage points.
The Portuguese Association for Renewable Energies (APREN) and environmental group, the Zero Association, today called for more effort on renewable energy production in Portugal as a way of increasing the country's self-reliance.
In a joint statement, the two associations looked at the 2017 performance and both have demanded a rapid expansion in renewable energy production for 2018.
In addition to EDP, another privatisation that is raking in the cash is Portugal’s formerly State-owned national airline which carried more than 14.2 million passengers last year, a credit to Gateway, the new shareholder at TAP whose experience is paying off.
Last year, TAP transported 14,274,000 passengers, 2.55 million more than in 2016, a growth of 21.7% over the year.
An astonishingly well preserved mural has been discovered behind an altarpiece in a northern Portuguese chapel.
Frescoes of over four metres in length and five metres high, painted in the early 1600s, show the story of St. John the Baptist. The work was discovered in the chapel of Santo Cristo, in Picote, when work began to restore the high altar.
