General Daily Briefing: Tuesday, 22 September 2026

Good morning. Here is your Tuesday briefing for 22 September 2026: the day's essential Portugal stories for residents, expats and anyone keeping an eye on the country, running from a rulebook that changes how power projects connect to the grid to the death of one of the country's most loved songwriters.

• Energy: from today a reserved grid connection can be split, swapped, moved or handed back, and the network operators must publish how much capacity is free at every interconnection point.
• Land: 232 hectares of commonland in the serra de Leomil leave the forest regime for two solar plants, replaced hectare for hectare by land the commoners volunteered.
• Culture: Jorge Palma died in Lisbon on Monday night at 76, and the tributes crossed every party in parliament.
• Heritage: two painted pilasters that sat in a garage at Caramulo for seventy years have been attributed to Columbano.
• Health: Portugal's first hundred specialist pharmacists qualify in 2027, and their regulator wants the health service to open posts for them now.
• Labour: Madeira's general-career public workers strike on 2 October, arguing the rising regional minimum wage is flattening the pay scale above it.

A Reserved Grid Connection Becomes Something You Can Trade, From Today

Portugal has spent three years arguing about who gets to connect a power station to the grid. From today the argument changes shape. Portaria n.º 433-A/2026/1, published on Monday in a supplement to the official gazette, is the rulebook for Decreto-Lei n.º 100/2026 of 22 May, and it sets out how a company that already holds a capacity reservation can split it, merge it with another, surrender it, swap it, cede it, change the generating technology behind it, hybridise it, cut its power or move where it plugs in. The object being managed is the TRC, the title reserving a slice of the grid's ability to absorb power at a given interconnection point; until this year it was effectively frozen, and you built what you had asked for, where you had asked for it, or you lost it. Every request now runs through the DGEG electronic platform. A split produces two or three autonomous titles, each of at least 50 MVA where they connect to the national transmission grid. The timetable is the part developers will read first: DGEG checks completeness within 10 days, forwards the file to the grid operator within 5, the operator has 90 days to issue a binding opinion, and DGEG decides within 10, all in working days. Where the opinion finds that network reinforcements are needed, it must quantify the capacity available before the works, the total expected afterwards, a timetable, the technical reasoning and the costs falling on the applicant, who then has 10 days to walk away. Two provisions matter beyond the developers. Article 7 obliges grid operators to publish, from today, the injection capacity available and already awarded at every interconnection point, naming the substation and the voltage level, and separating capacity that is already generating from capacity awarded but still idle. Portugal has never had that picture in public. The second is a deadline: how much of the deposit comes back on a surrender depends on whether the request arrives within 30 days of the portaria taking effect, which gives holders sitting on capacity they will never build until late October to give it up on the better terms.

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A Commonland Swap in Viseu Trades Forest Protection for Two Solar Plants

A decree published on Monday releases 232.22 hectares of commonland in the Viseu district from the forest protection it has carried since 1954, so that two photovoltaic plants can be built on it. To compensate, two commoner assemblies have volunteered 232.24 hectares of other commonland to take its place, leaving the protected area two hundred square metres larger than before. Decreto n.º 19/2026 concerns a parcel belonging to the Comunidade Local dos Compartes dos Baldios de Touro, in the freguesia of Touro, concelho of Vila Nova de Paiva. Baldios are commonland: neither municipal nor private property, but land held and administered by the community of local users through an assembly that votes on what happens to it. This stretch was placed under the partial forest regime by a decree of 13 December 1954 and folded into the forest perimeter of the serra de Leomil, and using it for anything other than forestry requires a decree undoing that one. The legal machinery is older still: the new decree cites articles of a decree of 24 December 1901 and its 1903 regulations. The compartes of Touro asked the ICNF to release the land for the Adomingueiros and Salgueiral plants, then voted unanimously to place 19.26 hectares of their remaining commonland under the same regime; the neighbouring compartes of Vila Cova à Coelheira voted unanimously to add 212.98 hectares of theirs. Two conditions are attached. Article 2 puts fire management squarely on the plant owner, who is made responsible for every measure required under the integrated rural fire management system along the full extent of the infrastructure and its surroundings, which matters on upland scrub in country that burns. Article 4 sets a clock: the plants must be installed within five years, and if they are not, the parcel is automatically reintegrated into the serra de Leomil perimeter with no new decree required. A developer cannot bank the exemption and sit on it.

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Jorge Palma Has Died at 76

Jorge Palma died in Lisbon on Monday night, aged 76. His family and his agency said in a statement shared on social media that the cause was a cardiorespiratory arrest. He had cancelled recent concerts with his two sons, in Lisbon and Oliveira do Hospital, on medical advice. He was one of the few Portuguese songwriters whose work crossed every audience in the country without quite belonging to the mainstream, and Tuesday morning's tributes came from across the political spectrum: Prime Minister Luís Montenegro said his voice and his timeless songs had helped transform Portuguese culture, Foreign Minister Paulo Rangel quoted a line of his lyrics and called it a sad day, very sad, for Portuguese music, and the Socialist leader José Luís Carneiro described an extraordinary body of work that had crossed generations. Palma was born in Lisbon in 1950, began piano lessons at six and entered the Conservatório de Música de Lisboa at ten. At fourteen he walked away from all of it for Elvis, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He played in the group Sindicato, which appeared at the first Vilar de Mouros festival in 1971, and in 1972 recorded his first single under his own name, "The Nine Billion Names of God", for which the label paid him in a washing machine and a fridge. Called up for military service the following year, he left the country instead, flying to London and on to Copenhagen, where he cleaned hotel rooms. He came back after 25 April 1974, released his first album in 1975, busked in Paris later that decade, returned to the conservatory in the 1980s and finished his piano studies in 1990. The record that made him, Só, followed in 1991: fifteen songs from the previous two decades revisited at the piano alone, made because the label was not inclined to spend on an artist who did not sell many records. Four more albums of originals followed, ending with Vida in 2023. Accepting a lifetime award in April this year, a red carnation in his lapel, he thanked the staff of the national health service for doing everything with very little, and asked the country not to let April 1974 fade into a distant memory.

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A Caramulo Garage Gives Up Two Columbanos After Seventy Years

Two wooden pilasters, each about three metres tall, spent more than seventy years under a cover in the garage of a house at Caramulo, in Tondela. The family that owns the house has now been told by specialists that the paintings on them are by Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro, the most important Portuguese portraitist of his generation, who died in 1929. The house was built by Abel Lacerda, the collector who founded the Museu do Caramulo; he lived in it from 1954 until his death in 1957, and the museum he assembled opened in 1959. His great-niece, Madalena Gouveia Reis, told the Lusa news agency that he had kept in the garage "some columns he must have bought, nobody knows where or from whom". The discovery came out of a family conversation a few weeks ago, when Abel Lacerda's son Miguel mentioned some columns that had been there for more than seventy years, with paintings on them, he said, by Columbano. The family lifted the covering and found what Gouveia Reis called a very interesting painting underneath. Photographs went to friends in museums and to art specialists, and the answer came back immediately. One of those consulted was Pedro Lapa, the curator and art historian who has studied Columbano's work, directed the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea at the Chiado and was artistic director of the Museu Coleção Berardo. Lapa told Lusa that he had examined the pilasters only in photographs, but that digital images show enough detail, and that these are without doubt decorative paintings by Columbano. He placed them alongside works of the same kind in the Hotel da Lapa in Lisbon, with dance and courtship as their themes, and would date them to the end of the nineteenth century or the beginning of the twentieth. His assessment of their quality was warmer than a simple attribution: these paintings, he said, are freer and less constrained than much of the artist's output. The figures on the wood are festive, which has led the family to suspect they once framed the ballroom of a palace.

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The First Specialist Pharmacists Qualify Next Year, and the Posts Are Not Open Yet

At the start of next year about a hundred pharmacists in Portugal will sit their final assessments and become the country's first formally qualified specialists in hospital pharmacy, clinical analyses and human genetics. Their regulator spent Monday asking the health service to decide, now rather than later, whether it intends to employ any of them. The Ordem dos Farmacêuticos said the SNS should open the posts needed to absorb them and should start preparing the recruitment immediately. "The preparation of the recruitment processes must go ahead as soon as possible," the bastonário, Hélder Mota Filipe, said, "avoiding a situation in which the absence of any prospect of being taken on leads these pharmacists to look for opportunities elsewhere and compromises the return on that investment in the quality of care provided to the population." The Residência Farmacêutica began in Portugal at the start of 2023. It is a four-year specialisation running in three areas, and the cohort finishing next year is the first to complete it, which makes 2027 the year the qualification stops being a plan and starts producing people. The scale behind that first cohort is larger than it looks: more than 500 pharmacists are currently in the residency, so the hundred qualifying in 2027 are the leading edge of an annual flow the health service will have to keep absorbing, or keep losing. Nothing in the statement asks for a change of policy. What it asks for is a calendar. Public recruitment in Portugal moves through published notices, ranking lists and appeal periods, and a competition opened after the assessments are done will still be running months later, by which point a newly qualified specialist with a four-year specialisation and no job offer has had ample time to take one abroad or in the private sector. The health ministry has not yet responded publicly.

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Madeira Stops on 2 October Over a Minimum Wage That Is Catching Its Own Pay Scale

Madeira's regional minimum wage is going up in 2027, from 980 euros to 1,050 euros. The union representing the general careers of the region's public administration says that is precisely the problem: hundreds of its members will end up earning exactly the regional minimum, whatever their seniority and whatever their performance appraisals have said. On Monday it called a strike for 2 October. The Sindicato dos Trabalhadores em Funções Públicas e Sociais do Sul e Regiões Autónomas announced the stoppage alongside its claims for 2027, arguing that a wage floor rising faster than the scale above it produces a policy of impoverishment in which a worker who has spent twenty years progressing through the grades arrives at the same figure as someone hired this year. The central demand is a supplement designed to restore the gaps the minimum wage is closing: 70 euros added at every level up to level 23 of the Madeira pay table, and 32 euros at the levels above it. That structure matters more than the headline number, because it is an attempt to rebuild the spacing between grades rather than simply to lift everybody by the same amount. Around it sit other claims: a meal allowance of 10.50 euros, urgent competitions for operational assistants in health and education, publication of the social sector collective agreement the union says has been delayed more than a year and a half, a new special career for education support technicians, and revision of the special careers for health support technicians, childcare support technicians and nature wardens. The strike covers central, local and regional services, and the choice of date is not a coincidence: three unions had already set 2 October as the strike date for the roughly 350,000 general-career public workers across the country. What Madeira adds is a regional wrinkle the mainland does not have, since the archipelago sets its own guaranteed minimum above the national figure, and the union's case is that raising it without adjusting the table above converts that advantage into a flattening of the whole structure.

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