Back in February, the Parliamentary Group of the Communist Party was complaining that the Algarve railway service was patchy at best, with many trains running late or not at all.
In reply, the Government blandly acknowleded that “delayed trains cause great inconvenience to users,” but has done nothing to improve the situation, despite saying at the time that it was exerting “the greatest efforts to improve the quality of the service provided.”
Travellers using Faro airport and heading for the delights on Italy now have a choice of more than one destination airport as easyJet is to offer a service to and from Milan.
Volotea announced in October that it was to provide a service between Faro and Verona next June, to the delight of opera lovers.
There will be a ferry service between Madeira and the Portuguese mainland as from the summer of 2018
The deadline is up for applications to run the weekly passengers and goods service out of Funchal and there has been a veritable queue of ship owners, 13 to date, interested in managing the weekly connection.
The chronically inefficient state of Portugal’s housing stock has been highlighted in a report commissioned by Quercus and carried out by the Sustainable Construction Portal.
Only one in a hundred Portuguese householders consider their home to be thermally comfortable, while nearly three-quarters saying they are cold in the house, leading to high heating bills.
The weather should remain clear dry until Christmas Eve, with cloudless skies and little chance of rain, according to today’s forecast.
According to the IPMA, in the next few days the minimum temperature should vary between -5 and 0°C in the North and Centre of the country, between 0°C and 4°C in the Southern Alentejo, and between 2°C and 8°C along coastal areas.
IKEA's tax deal with the Netherlands is to be investigated by Brussels on suspicion that the Swedish chain has benefited from huge tax reductions that are against European rules on state aid.
"The European Commission has opened an in-depth investigation into the tax treatment given by the Netherlands to Inter IKEA, one of the two groups that operate the IKEA business," the European Commission stated, adding that there is concern that two Dutch tax decisions "may have allowed Inter IKEA to pay less taxes and confer an unfair advantage on the company over other companies, in breach of EU state aid rules."
A group of big investors, ripped-off by the Bank of Portugal in 2015, is fed up with being fobbed off.
Nursing over €2 billion in losses, Attestor Capital, BlackRock, CQS and PIMCO were tricked when Carlos Costa, governor of the Bank of Portugal, switched their bonds from the newly created Novo Banco, to the bankrupt BES - rendering their investments worthless.
The mussel and oyster sector of Portugal sea economy is on high alert after researchers from the Portuguese Institute of the Sea and Atmosphere (IPMA), located a foreign invasive species that poses a serious threat to stocks.
Portugal also has put producers along Spain’s Galician coast on alert due to the rapid proliferation of the Ascidia Styela plicata, or ‘sea squirt,’ which competes directly for food with native shellfish and munches its larvae.
