A fire that broke out on Wednesday afternoon, September 6th, in Barranco da Vaca, Aljezur, has been put out with the help of five specialist firefighting aircraft.
According to José Amarelinho, mayor of Aljezur, the fire most likely was started by a brush-cutter being used by a member of a maintenance crew clearing scrub near EDP cables and electricity poles.
Ryanair is changing the rules for existing and all future bookings by ending its policy of allowing non-priority passengers to carry two items of hand luggage on board.
The no-frills Irish airline said it had made the decision because many if its flights are being delayed due a lack of space in its fleet’s overhead lockers.
In February this year, the government was reported to have decided that Montijo airbase should be converted to civilian use to ease the congestion at Lisbon’s Humberto Delgado’s airport.
The government was said to have chosen the Montijo air base solution, rather than developing airports at Sintra or Alverca, or building a completely new airport at Alcohete, on logistical, cost and speed grounds.
In a survey, guaranteed to gain wide coverage across Portugal’s media, the country has been nominated as the fifth best in the world in which expats live and work.
The Expat Insider survey, conducted annually by InterNations, this year received opinions from 13,000 expatriates from 166 countries.
Portugal’s food safety authority, ASAE, has issued a statement in the face of the European egg contamination scandal, saying today that the detection of contaminated eggs, purchased in Belgium by a Portuguese construction company, does not represent a risk at the moment, nor does it require any swift action as these eggs “may not even have reached Portugal.”
The reason Portugal has been included in a Europe-wide ban on egg shipments is that the Portuguese company was logged as buying the eggs in Belgium on August 19. The purchase was "transacted for a Portuguese company", but "probably, from the amount purchased, was by a person linked to a company" who bought "about a dozen" of the offending articles.
Portugal’s authorities have detained 128 people so far this year for setting light to forests.
The number of arrests is a welcome 75% increase over 2016, according to the National Civil Protection Authority.
The Algarve’s hotels were full this August, despite tales of doom and gloom that the Brits were staying away due to Brexit and, more importantly, the exchange rate between the euro and the pound.
The Algarve’s hotels’ association said that August 2017 showed a close to bursting 93.9% occupancy rate, the same as last year when the resurgence of tourism started to give the country the economic boost required to start lifting it out of economic gloom and despair.
The Culatra Island Residents' Association’s long-running complaint that the Culatra harbour entrance pontoon was tatty, increasingly dangerous and overdue for maintenance has at last been attended to - and in record time.
Ana Paula Vitorino, Minister of the Sea, visited the Ria Formosa island in July and work on the pontoon started at the end of August, taking just a week to complete.
