Tax from house sales in the Loulé area will raise €27 million for the council’s coffers next year.

This is the figure in the 2017 council budget under the heading IMT, the municipal tax on real estate sales.

Portugal is to extradite to Italy, Sabrina de Sousa, a former US spy convicted of conspiring to abduct the Egyptian cleric Abu Omar in 2003.

De Sousa, a Portuguese-American dual national is a former CIA agent, said last week that the extradition process was due to start "after January 3rd."

As we raise glasses to the notion of peace and goodwill on Earth, more realistic hopes are centred on Portugal’s António Guterres who takes office as United Nations Secretary-General on New Year’s Day.

One of the few things top leaders across this bitterly divided world seem to agree on is that Guterres is the best man for the herculean task of curbing warfare, deprivation and poverty.

A group of utterly fed up creditors have lodged a lawsuit to block the imminent sale of Novo Banco.

The group, made up of 232 smaller depositors at the original Banco Espírito Santo, lodged the injunction on Wednesday at the Administrative Court in Lisbon. Drawn up by legal firm Miguel Reis and Associados, the defendants are named as the Bank of Portugal, the Ministry of Finance, Novo Banco, BES and the Resolution Fund.

The more accurate figures is 22.3% of those people in Portugal now living elsewhere, the most popular destination in recent years being the ‘old ally’ Britain.

The number of emigrants born in Portugal now has exceeded 2.3 million, 22.3% of the Portuguese population.

Support for Portugal’s agricultural sector continues with an eye-watering €1.7 billion delivered to farmers during the course of 2016.

The final payment for the year was released today by the Ministry of Agriculture with €463.2 million in ‘aid,’ under various headings,  winging its way to farmers and agricultural businesses across the country.

The cement producer Cimpor has announced that production at its Loulé plant will be resumed in February, 2017 and it will bring back suspended workers, although how many of the 57 that were laid off are to be taken back, remains to be announced.

Cimpor reports that "a slight sign of a recovery in the domestic market and a more positive expectation on the export front have created the minimum conditions to fire up the furnace again at the Loulé production centre with the layoff period officially ending on January 31st, 2017."

As the Algarve’s hoteliers gear up for a record-breaking New Year’s Eve across the Algarve, the region’s hotel workers’ trade union organised a high-profile demonstration in Vilamoura on Thursday.

The dismissal of three employees from the Crowne Plaza Hotel has been slammed by union leaders as "illegal," and part of a general trend of "increasing employer repression In recent months."