The Porto Brief, Week of 13 September 2026: Lorries Come Off the VCI on Tuesday, Nineteen Trees Come Off the Aliados, and the Mobility Plan Gets a 1.2 Billion Euro Price Tag

Welcome to the Porto Brief, your weekly view from the banks of the Douro. This week the city put a price on its ten-year mobility plan, condemned nineteen trees on the Aliados, and got ready to take the lorries off the VCI on Tuesday morning. Your roundup for 6 to 13 September.

Lorries come off the VCI on Tuesday

From Tuesday 15 September, heavy goods vehicles are barred from the Via de Cintura Interna between 7h and 21h on weekdays. The exception is traffic loading or unloading in Porto or Vila Nova de Gaia, and those journeys must be registered in advance on a digital platform each council is meant to provide. On Wednesday Pedro Duarte said Porto's platform was in "final tests" and would be "extraordinarily simple" to use, with "no reason to think" it would not be running on the day. He also stressed that the ban does not depend on it: it comes from a government decree, and the transport documents hauliers already file with the Tax Authority are enough to enforce it. The CREP/A41 is toll free for heavy vehicles.

The mobility plan costs 1.2 billion, and half of that is metro

Ahead of Tuesday's executive meeting, Lusa read the costings inside the Plano de Mobilidade Urbana Sustentável. Executing it in full comes to about 1.2 billion euros over ten years, spread across several bodies. Public transport takes roughly 75 percent of that, with metro expansion alone at 600 million euros, half the plan. Circulation, parking and logistics take 176 million and active modes 88 million. Little of it is soon: 81.1 million falls within two years and 945.3 million beyond five. Porto's own share is 478.3 million.

Nineteen trees on the Aliados

After a tree came down on the Avenida dos Aliados on 16 August, the council surveyed all 56 trees on the avenue. Nineteen failed. Vice-president Catarina Araújo told Tuesday's public meeting they showed "phytosanitary and biomechanical weaknesses", thin crowns and rot at the limbs and collar, and would come down within the week. The other 37 are to be replaced over two years, along with 15 empty tree pits. The Norway maples are going; the replacements are scarlet oak, Quercus coccinea, chosen for urban resilience.

The same meeting heard the working group set up in July recommend a Plano de Pormenor de Salvaguarda for the UNESCO-listed historic centre. The architect Teresa Cunha Ferreira said that instrument would protect the architecture and also regulate what happens inside it, capping licences for souvenir shops and takeaways among other things. Councillors also got the Feira do Livro's numbers: 231,000 visitors over seventeen days in the Palácio de Cristal gardens, the second best attended edition ever, held back only by two days of storms that shut the stalls in late August.

Money, buildings and a lifted embargo

The city is putting almost eleven million euros of its own money into five health centres → after the Recovery Plan covered 300,000. At the Coliseu, the economy minister Manuel Castro Almeida said on Wednesday that the venue's 2.5 million euros from the Norte 2030 programme falls short of works costing seven million, and that the government and the council will try to raise the support to 4.5 million through European funds. The council also confirmed it lifted the partial embargo on the Emporium Park development beside the Parque da Cidade in July, once the builder demolished the 80 centimetres by which the block overshot its authorised height. And in Massarelos, about a hundred residents and traders have asked for resident parking and loading bays around the Cais das Pedras, saying the daytime spaces go to Hospital de Santo António and Porto Editora users and the nights to the bars.

Around the north

Gaia's executive voted unanimously on Friday to ask for the A29 and A32 toll gantries to be scrapped in the 2027 State Budget. Valongo confirmed two legionella clusters in Sobrado and Ermesinde, and the verdict on its current and former mayors moved to 24 September. Porto's first deep tech cohort filled 31 of 40 places, Boavista's creditors are weighing 33 million euros from a Lisbon property group, and Shopping Brasília turns fifty next month.

Further out, seven northern hospitals are asking doctors to enter the funding code themselves, ANA wants 34 more cents a passenger at Porto airport next year, and shepherds in Miranda do Douro say the wolf compensation comes two years late. On the river, 1.39 million passengers travelled last year, and the locks are now the ceiling.

At the Dragão

A hard week and then an easy one. Manchester City won 2-0 at the Dragão on Tuesday in the opening round of the Champions League, Haaland scoring twice; Diogo Costa kept the first half goalless almost single-handedly, and FC Porto did not manage a shot on target. On Saturday they went to Rio Maior, where Casa Pia beat them in February, and won 4-1, Kiwior involved in two goals. Six league games, six wins, and the lead holds. The season's first clássico is at the Dragão on 20 September, against Benfica.

What's on

The Teatro Municipal opens its season free of charge on 18 and 19 September, with a film shot in a single take between the Rua de Passos Manuel and the Praça D. João I, the audience in it, each take projected at the Rivoli afterwards. The Festival Cidnay Vale do Ave runs to 26 September across Famalicão, Santo Tirso and Trofa, 43 events and 55 artists, including a concert at sunrise on 19 September. And at the Igreja da Lapa, where the city buried former mayor Nuno Cardoso on Tuesday, the Irmandade will show the heart of D. Pedro IV in public on 25, 26 and 27 September. He left it to the city after living through the siege; it has sat in the mausoleum there since the 1930s.

That is the week in the Invicta. If there is a story we have missed on your doorstep, just hit reply. The Portugal Brief

Feature image: the Via de Cintura Interna in Porto, by chermida (CC BY 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons.