Welcome to the Week em Breve, a wrap-up of important Portuguese news to keep you up to date and in the know.
14-year-old admits to starting several fires
As fires continue raging through parts of Portugal — there were 97 active fires as of Friday morning — a 14-year-old in the Braga area has admitted that he was behind several of them, according to Euronews.
Polícia Judiciária said, in a statement cited by Euronews, that the boy may have been driven by “his poor school performance and the obvious precariousness of his social relationships.”
The boy said he cruised around on his scooter in forested areas and started fires with matches, according to Euronews.
Portuguese authorities had already arrested 52 suspected arsonists by Aug. 20, according to Lusa.
Government debt upgraded
Portugal’s junk-bond status of the 2010s appears well behind it: the S&P raised the country’s government bond rating to A+, according to Bloomberg.
That upgrade came after the country’s National Statistics Institute said that gross domestic product grew 0.6% in the second quarter of 2025 from the first, according to Reuters.
Defense spending soars 30%
Where is all that money going, you may wonder?
Well, Portugal’s defense spending is expected to hit 2% of its GDP for 2025, marking an almost 30% surge from the 1.58% of GDP spent in 2024 and finally meeting the minimum stipulated by NATO in the wake of Russian’s invasion of Ukraine, according to a new report from the military alliance.
That’s still well below the 2.76% average for the alliance overall, in which Poland is in the lead, with 4.48% of its GDP projected to go toward defense, followed by Lithuania, where it’s estimated to be 4.00%.
Both countries share a land border with Russia’s ally Belarus as well as with Russia itself — more specifically, with the exclave Kaliningrad Oblast, which isn’t connected to the Russian mainland.
Foreign language education lags behind
It’s unclear whether spending on education will rise as much as it is for defense, but it may have to.
Only 6.7% of Portugal’s students in secondary education are learning two or more foreign languages, compared to an average of 60.8% for all of the European Union, according to a new report from Eurostat.
Portugal is dead-last in the ranking — the second-lowest ratio is in Ireland, where it’s 10.4%, followed by Spain, where it’s 22.4%.
CTT suspends shipping packages to the U.S.
Meanwhile, Portugal’s privatized national mail service, CTT, has announced that it’s stopped shipping packages to the U.S. effective Aug. 29.
Portugal is one of more than 30 countries that have suspended or curbed shipping to the U.S. in light of U.S. President Donald Trump’s new tariffs going into effect this week, according to data from the United Nations’ Universal Postal Union cited by USA Today.
CTT confirmed in its statement that it will continue to send documents “without commercial value,” such as ID documents, and postcards.
Possible cause of Lisbon’s 1755 earthquake found 200 km off the coast
A fissure discovered 200 kilometers off the coast of Cabo de São Vicente recently may have been the cause of the earthquake that devastated Lisbon in 1755, according to a new scientific paper published in the journal Nature Geosciences.
The earthquake, as well as the subsequent tsunami, were likely caused by the “delamination of oceanic lithosphere” — or the separating of the tectonic plate because of a horizontal fracture.
Property prices up almost 20% year-over-year
Property prices, as measured by bank appraisals, continued rising in July, with the median value hitting €1,945 per square meter, according to a new report from the National Institute of Statistics (Instituto Nacional de Estatística, INE).
That’s 1.8% higher than in June and 18.7% higher than July last year, INE said.
The highest appraisal values were in Greater Lisbon, where the median was €2,990 per square meter.
