The Lisboa Brief, Week of 12 September 2026: A Fixed Price From the Airport Rank on 15 October, Five Metres of Pavement to Sweep, and the Rato Police Trial Opens

From 15 October a taxi out of Lisbon airport stops running on a meter and starts running on a price list. Elsewhere: the city executive wants a café with tables outside to sweep five metres of pavement instead of two, Web Summit's contract with the capital has more than one suitor waiting for 2028, Lisbon parents whose children still have no school place are preparing to sue the state, and the Rato police trial opened on Friday.

A Price List Instead of a Meter

A protocol signed on Friday between the Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, the two national taxi bodies, the Associação de Turismo de Lisboa and the airport operator ANA replaces metered fares from the arrivals rank with fixed prices by destination, with a higher rate at night. The mechanism that makes it stick is the rank itself: a driver who will not take the fixed price does not get to use it.

The city is split in two. Alvalade, Areeiro, Avenidas Novas, Lumiar and Parque das Nações cost 16 euros by day and 20 at night. Benfica, Campolide, Campo de Ourique, Estrela, Alcântara, Arroios and Santa Maria Maior cost 19 and 23, which puts Baixa and Alfama in the dearer band despite the distance. Oeiras is listed at 36.80 euros by day. Carlos Moedas framed the change as safety rather than pricing, pointing to a PSP operation in August that checked around 100 taxis and found 67 infractions, close to half of them irregular meters.

The airport itself gets slightly dearer next year. Lisbon's regulated charges would rise 0.67 percent under ANA's 2027 proposal, about ten cents a passenger, against 3.77 percent at Porto and 3.79 at Faro. ANAC still has to approve it, and none of it covers the new Alcochete airport.

Five Metres of Pavement

The city executive approved a draft waste and urban hygiene regulation on Wednesday. The strip of pedestrian space a business must clean daily goes from two metres to five, and cafés, kiosks and food trucks must supply their own street-level bins and ashtrays. The minimum fine rises from 50 euros to 90, and the enforcement team goes from 18 inspectors to around 60 by the end of the year, which is the number that decides whether any of it bites. A 30-day public consultation comes next.

On air, the news is thinner than it looks. Zero and the Conselho Português para a Saúde e Ambiente went back to the state's monitoring database for Clean Air Day and found Avenida da Liberdade at 40.3 micrograms of nitrogen dioxide per cubic metre, clearing the current ceiling of 40 only on rounding. The ceiling Portugal must meet by 2030 is 20.

The Conference and the Contract

Lisbon's contract to host Web Summit expires in 2028, and the chief executive of Startup Portugal has confirmed that Poland is not the only country trying to take it away. Several candidates have surfaced in recent months, and the association is feeding the government material for the renewal case.

Children Still Waiting

Term has started and families around Lisbon are still looking at the words "Não Colocado" on the enrolment portal. Rui Boavida has been waiting since the end of July on a transfer for his twins and knows of more than a dozen pupils in the same position. The families have formed a group called Não Somos Bonecos and are preparing to sue the Education Ministry. Their complaint is less the shortage of places than the silence: the DGEstE counter that used to place pupils by hand was dissolved a few months ago.

A second regional gap is about to be filled. Portugal runs 37 specialist teams giving free psychological support to children who were victims of domestic violence or watched it at home, and until last year Greater Lisbon had none. It now has one, in Cascais. A CIG tender closing on 6 October would add three more, in Lisbon, in Sintra, and one covering Amadora and Loures, for 648,000 euros over a first year.

In the Courts

The trial of two PSP officers from the Rato station opened on Friday morning. The main defendant, 22 and held since July 2025, faces 29 charges including six of torture and five of rape; the second, 26 and under house arrest, faces seven. The indictment describes the victims as mostly drug users, foreign nationals without regular status and people living on the street, which is to say people with little capacity to complain. Some images, prosecutors say, were shared in WhatsApp groups with dozens of other officers.

In Sintra, the administrative court has reopened hearings over the Quinta dos Ingleses, the wooded estate behind Carcavelos beach, with further sittings on the 25th and the 28th. It is a popular action brought by the residents' movement 66 Pela Quinta against Cascais council, and it will decide whether 850 flats go up there.

Across the Estuary and Around the Region

The health inspectorate has opened a formal case into the Almada hospital that closed its termination clinic, the fifth abortion-access process since 2023. At Costa da Caparica, a British food creator who has settled here turned a stretch of sand into an open-air dining room on Thursday to push the UNESCO campaign for arte xávega, the beach-seine fishery still worked by tractor there. Loures handed out the first 5,000 of 20,000 drink-testing wristbands at a concert gate, and the mayor was careful to say no incident prompted it. And at Tires in Cascais, the 95-year-old who ran Formula One for four decades landed with a shotgun aboard his jet and left in PSP custody.

One Number

42.4 million. That is what Metro de Lisboa carried between April and June, down 4.4 percent and its third year-on-year fall in a row, in a quarter when Metro do Porto rose 4.8 percent and the railways added 3.7 million passengers.

On in Lisbon

The Festa do Livro takes the gardens of the Palácio de Belém from Thursday 17 to Sunday 20 September, opening with Kátia Guerreiro and Vitorino Salomé singing songs by António Lobo Antunes, who died in March. ÁTOA and NAPA play the Friday and Saturday nights, and GNR close on the Sunday. Festas na Rua returns to the Jardim Keil do Amaral in Monsanto with DJ Pantaleão on the 18th and DJ Jay Lion on the 19th, and the Desfile pela Paz e Lavagem de Santo António falls on the 20th. On the 26th, Rui Massena plays the garden of the Palácio da Alfarrobeira in Benfica with Carlão, and Cinema na Praça takes the Alameda D. Afonso Henriques the same evening. The Feira da Luz runs daily in Carnide until 27 September.

That is the capital's week. The Lisboa Brief returns next Saturday.

Feature image: taxis outside the terminal at Lisbon's Portela airport, by Sharon Hahn Darlin (CC BY 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons.