The Algarve’s hoteliers association reports that January tourism figures were up 16% year-on-year with a consequent welcome rise in income.
The provisional figures are for an increase in tourist numbers of 15.9%, up 4.6 points, to a 33.6% occupancy level.
This figure is better than for every January since the 36.7% occupancy rate recorded in 2007.
Portugal wants Britain to stay in the European Union, but while the new Socialist government will listen to Prime Minister David Cameron’s requests for EU reforms, certain demands would be beyond the pale.
“Our position is very simple,” said Portugal’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Augusto Santos Silva, this week. “We will do everything in our power so that the UK remains in the EU.”
A businessman from Porto de Mós, Leiria, convicted in 2010 of shooting a man dead who had been caught robbing his Madiver company premises, received a 13-year sentence but later fled the country.
António Bastos, also a director of the União de Leiria football club, was sentenced to 12 years and six months in prison for murder, plus one year and two months for the use of a prohibited weapon in the 2009 incident.
The Portuguese government’s Environment Committee has called for the urgent creation of ... another committee to review a dodgy Spanish nuclear power station just 100 kilometres from the border at Almaraz, to the North East of Caceres.
Portugal says this is "an exceptionally serious situation" at an emergency meeting on Thursday after reports that there are serious doubts over the essential servicing of the power station’s cooling system.
David Santos has decided to stay on as president of the Algarve’s Commission for Coordination and Regional Development (CCDR) despite having been elected as head of the region’s Social Democratic Party.
David Santos was elected president of the Social Democratic Party for the Algarve last Saturday, but refuses to stand down from his well remunerated CCDR role despite the clear conflict of interests.
The GNR and Spain’s Guardia Civil joined forces at the Guadiana river border today in seizing 1,620 kilos of hashish from two drug boats.
The GNR announced the seizure late on Wednesday of a vessel carrying 1,320 kilos of hashish sailing toward the Guadiana river. The crew jumped and swam off to Spain.
The self-styled Islamic State again has threatened Spain and Portugal, this time in a video in which the spokesperson, the son of Portuguese emigrants to Luxembourg, says there is a plan to recapture the Iberian Peninsula. "You will pay dearly" for having driven out the Muslims.
The video shows the murder of five people in Iraq and features the terrorist, known as Steve D A making threats about invading the Iberian peninsula.
Portimão councillors and planning experts unanimously have rejected a planning application put forward by Butwell Trading to turn its 200 hectare Quinta da Rocha estate into a tourist complex including two, five star hotels.
Taking a firm environmental and legal standpoint, a committee of Portimão councillors and experts has rejected plans for a Tourism Development Center on the banks of the Ria de Alvor due in part to a history of law-breaking and environmental abuse.
