Portuguese 16-year-olds have admitted that when it comes to getting hold of alcohol, the law is no barrier and they consider it ‘easy’ or ‘very easy’ to get hold of supplies.
This age group are ahead of their European counterparts in trying their first cigarette which, in the case of Portuguese kids is at 13 but their use of drugs is falling.
The summer figures are in for the Algarve’s sick and injured tourists, with beach-based medical centres treating over 8,000 tourists.
According to the Regional Health Administration of the Algarve, these local consultations contributed to a significant easing of pressure on the region’s hospitals.
An additional 4,500 tourists visited special tourist consultation areas at 12 heath centres with 8,433 treated at one of 32 pop-up centres on the region’s beaches.
Algarve Tourism Association (ATA) staff have gone back to France to the country’s leading trade fair for tourism, the International French Travel Market Top Resa, with 30,000 industry professional expected to attend.
After several years of not going, the decision by ATA to be present at the 2016 event was spurred on by the growth in French tourists to Portugal and the numbers moving to the country, often for tax reasons.
In a country where the Mediterranean diet has gained UNESCO's 'Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity' recognition, seven out of ten Portuguese children consume insufficient quantities of fruit, defined as being below the three daily servings recommended by the World Health Organisation.
The Portuguese Association Against Childhood Obesity has sampled 18,000 school children between two and twelve-years-old with results showing that 83.6% of children in the Açores eat below their recommended daily intake, compared to 73.6% in the Algarve.
German’s leader, Angela Merkel, vowed on Monday that the country would see no repetition of last year’s chaotic scenes on German borders.
“No one wants a repeat of last year’s situation, including me,” Merkel said.
Deputy Minister Eduardo Cabrita, the man in charge of refugees coming to Portugal, said the government is to “double by the end of the year” the number accepted and relocated.
This figure will not be hard to achieve as so far Portugal has taken in 534 from the camps in Italy and Greece but Cabrita remains confident that significant numbers will arrive in the next few weeks.
Barcelona has demanded fines of €30,000 from TripAdvisor and eight other accommodation sites over illegal holiday property rentals, a move that Portuguese authorites seem loathe to make.
In July and August, the Spanish city ordered the closure of 615 rental properties that were being offered without licences, according to a Catalan news site Ara.cat on Monday.
The European Commission estimates that new measures amounting to €450 million will have to be put in place if Portugal is to meet its 2016 fiscal targets.
The government needs to submit a ‘list of things to do’ by October 15th with "effective measures” to be implemented by the end of the year.
