A Violent Weekend in Lisbon and Porto Exposes a Fake-Drug Trade the Law Still Cannot Touch
A 25-year-old man was stabbed to death at Cais do Sodré on Sunday, one of three violent incidents across Lisbon and Porto in thirty-six hours. Two of the weekend's flashpoints trace back to the street trade in fake drugs — a decades-old business Portuguese law still does not treat as a crime.
Portugal's two biggest tourist cities have had a bruising weekend. On Sunday, a 25-year-old man was stabbed in the chest in the garden at Cais do Sodré, one of Lisbon's busiest riverside squares, shortly after midday. He was found unconscious beside a kiosk, treated at the scene and taken to Hospital de São José, where his death was confirmed at 1.12pm. The attacker fled toward Terreiro do Paço, and the Polícia Judiciária (Judicial Police), which handles homicides, had made no arrest as this went to press. The motive is not yet known.
It was the gravest of three incidents in barely thirty-six hours. On Saturday night, a group assaulted at least six tourists on Rua Cândido dos Reis, in the heart of Porto's Galerias nightlife district; four were taken to hospital, and a security guard was hurt in a separate clash on the same street hours later, according to Expresso. In the early hours of Sunday, a 41-year-old ride-hail (TVDE) driver was shot in the leg as he sat in his parked car in Agualva-Cacém, in the Sintra municipality, by three men who then fled. He is in a stable condition.
The three cases are not obviously connected, and the Sintra shooting fits a longer-running pattern of gun violence on Greater Lisbon's periphery rather than the trouble downtown. But two of the weekend's flashpoints — Porto's Galerias, and, a week earlier, Lisbon's Baixa — share a backdrop the authorities have been arguing about all month: the street trade in fake drugs.
That trade has a name in Portugal, louro prensado — pressed bay leaf sold to tourists as cannabis, alongside talc or chalk passed off as cocaine. It has operated in high-footfall parts of Lisbon, Porto and the Algarve for more than twenty years, and the Porto beating was reportedly the work of men who peddle it around the Galerias. The problem turned lethal on 10 August, when a Swedish visitor was hit by a stray bullet on Rua Augusta during a dispute between rival sellers — an episode that prompted the government to step up policing in downtown Lisbon, reinforcing the Baixa with Corpo de Intervenção riot units.
Here lies the awkward part. Selling a fake narcotic is not the crime of drug trafficking, so the sellers occupy a legal grey zone that police say they cannot properly act on. Over the past week the PSP, the liberal party Iniciativa Liberal (Liberal Initiative) and Lisbon City Hall have all pressed for the sale of counterfeit drugs to be made a crime; one police-union leader put it bluntly — what is missing, he said, is "penal cover."
The statistics, meanwhile, tell a calmer story than the headlines. The 2025 internal-security report, presented in March, recorded violent and serious crime down 1.6% on the year and robberies down 7.4%, even as overall reported crime edged up. The same body of data has tracked, in granular detail, who bears the brunt of Portuguese crime — one in seven victims is now over 65. For residents and visitors alike, the honest takeaway is narrower than a crime wave: a handful of specific hotspots and hours — Cais do Sodré, the Galerias, the Baixa — where a tolerated illegal trade keeps turning ugly, and where the law has yet to catch up.
